The nerdy, naughty Colin Mochrie that we have grown to know and love while watching such shows as “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and “Drew Carey’s Improv-A-Ganza” doesn’t really exist.

So confessed the real Mochrie in a phone interview.

He says that when he and his wife, Canadian actress and comedienne Debra McGrath, watch old episodes of “Whose Line,” she refers to the Mochrie she sees on the screen as “The Other.”

“He’s really nothing like me,” he says. “I am the quiet one, and she’s the funny one in the marriage. She’s the one who tells hilarious stories.

“Anyone who thinks they know Colin Mochrie based on watching ‘Whose Line,’ doesn’t really know Colin Mochrie at all,” he says.

Mochrie will perform with frequent cast mate Brad Sherwood tonight at the Honeywell Center in Wabash.

The real Colin Mochrie is more reserved and less inclined to feel as if he needs to be the life of the party all the time.

Mochrie was born in Scotland in 1957. His family ended up in Vancouver, British Columbia, 12 years later (with a stint in Montreal in between).

Mochrie was thinking that he might want to pursue marine biology as a career until he got a big laugh in a school play when his character split his pants.

In the words of the author of “Unfinished Novels By Female Writers,” that was all she wrote.

After high school, Mochrie nixed the fish and enrolled in Vancouver’s Studio 58 theater school. It was there that he discovered the thing for which he would one day become well-known: improvisational comedy.

“That was one of those things, maybe the only thing, that I took to immediately,” he says. “I had some skill, but the people I was improvising with at the time were all great improv artists, so I learned a lot.”

Ironically, Mochrie didn’t become a celebrity in Canada until he had become a celebrity in the United States.

Around 1990, Mochrie moved to Los Angeles with a pregnant McGrath in part to apply for the British version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway.” It took three auditions before Mochrie secured a permanent place on the series.

Mochrie says he didn’t know how to drive a car when he moved to L.A., but he felt obligated to learn because his wife was pregnant.

“I had my first (driving) lesson on the Hollywood Freeway,” he says. “I thought, ‘This cannot be right! I should be easing into this!’ ”

Mochrie says Game Show Network’s “Drew Carey’s Improv-A-Ganza,” which was recently canceled, grew out of enormous improv shows that Carey used to host in Las Vegas every Super Bowl weekend.

Being onstage with roughly a dozen other improv artists is not so much fun if what an improv artist wants to be is prominently featured, so he and Sherwood decided to form a two-man act and go out on tour.

That was almost 10 years ago.

Mochrie says he doesn’t really experience stage fright anymore unless it is in that moment when he realizes “people spent money and we don’t have a show for them.”

One of the benefits of improv, Mochrie says, is that if one performer can’t think of something to say, there’s usually another performer nearby who will step into the breech.

“You really know you’re alive at that point onstage,” he says. “You feel each individual bead of sweat going down your back.

“Fortunately, we have never had a time when both of us had nothing to offer,” Mochrie says. “If we ever do, then the pants will come off.”

On tour, Mochrie and Sherwood are their own bosses, which is a refreshing change from the “never too many cooks” philosophy that governs most of the other things they do in the entertainment business.

“It is totally on our shoulders,” he says. “There’s no network executive saying, ‘What you need is a dog that talks.’ ”

Mochrie says he and Sherwood have no plans ever to retire from touring.

“We’re the Rolling Stones of improv,” Mochrie says. “We’ll keep going until one of us snorts his father’s ashes.”

spen@jg.net