That Colin Mochrie seems nice is not the most astonishing sentence ever written. He was actually born in Scotland, but in general, he’s thought of as Canadian, and the Canadians do have that reputation, after all. He’s also been The Token Canadian for an enormous amount of his career, be it in a cast of Brits with a sprinkling of Americans or a cast of Americans with the occasional Brit. He’s been in the US for a long time, but there are still definite Canadian notes to his voice. What’s weird is that he does a kind of lousy Scottish accent.

Mochrie’s been doing improv about as long as I’ve been alive, and I am not the youngest writer for The Solute. He’d initially been a loner who planned to be a marine biologist. When he was persuaded by a friend to audition for a play instead, he got his first laugh onstage and was hooked. He ended up auditioning for Whose Line Is It Anyway? a total of three times before finally getting a slot as a regular. He appeared on the British version 57 times. When the American version was made, he became a cast member of that as well, appearing on 219 episodes of the first series and 160 of the second. That’s all of them, for the American ones.

Apparently, what actually scares him is the musical games. He can’t sing and knows he can’t sing, and after 436 episodes, he’s probably pretty well run out of dodges to avoid having to perform them. He likes “Scenes From a Hat” and “Whose Line.” I myself love the segments where he and Ryan host a commercial for a musical compilation set; sometimes, they make me laugh so hard I can’t breathe. It helps that he’s got good comedic partners; his friendship with Ryan Stiles goes back to the early ‘80s, and the only reason it doesn’t seem as though they can read one another’s minds is the ease with which they startle one another into laughter.

Mochrie is also a solid argument against the “from a different era” explanation as to why people can’t be supportive of their trans children or other trans people. He’s not much younger than my mom—he’s 64—and he is constantly supportive of his daughter, Kinley. Any feelings he may have had that weren’t supportive, and I’m not saying he necessarily had them but you never know, he has never made public. He’s defended her from trolls and consistently been the kindly Canadian dad we’d all love to have.

How Canadian is he? To my disappointment, he was never on Due South. He was never even on Slings & Arrows. However, he’s been on two episodes of The Red Green Show, three of Royal Canadian Air Farce, and one of Degrassi: The Next Generation. He’s done two of Little Mosque on the Prairie. He was Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town and on the recent Amazon revival. He was in something called Mulroney: The Opera and on an episode of Men With Brooms. Perhaps most Canadian of all, he did five episodes of Murdoch Mysteries. All as the same character. Maybe he was born in Scotland, but all in all, it doesn’t get much more Canadian.

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