Hilarious In Hindsight / Whose Line Is It Anyway?

It probably shouldn't be a surprise that there's a plethora of Hilarious in Hindsight on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, given all the bajillion pop culture references, but man, it's something to behold.

• The only game ever of Survival Show resulted in Greg saying "I'm available to host The Price Is Right..." Some years down the line, Bob Barker retires - Drew Carey takes the reins. Then Brad decides to become the announcer. More hilarity ensues.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: On Price, Drew is a very kind man, and easily on his best on-camera behavior ever. In other words, Drew is not really a jerk, and his tenure on Whose Line? was just one long opportunity to cut loose, like a glorified bachelor party. No wonder he was so kind to Laura Hall.
• Brad's role borders on awesome when you consider a Let's Make A Date playing where his quirk was as a "game show prize announcer", and his The Price Is Right impression was spot on.
  • Made doubly funny when Wayne's response refers to Let's Make a Deal.
• A hoedown was done about game show hosts. Again, Drew became the host of The Price Is Right, Wayne became the host of Let's Make a Deal and Don't Forget the Lyrics!, and Colin hosts the Canadian version of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?.
• During one such Hoedown about House Arrest, Colin says he's got a real easy parole officer. The parole officer is Charlie Sheen.
• Score one more for Greg: the first ever game of Sports Commentators had him in the role of one of the commentators. Bonus points for Rory, the other commentator, going into one of his obscure accents.
• When Jonathan Pryce guest starred in one episode from 1989, he played a pirate in Party Quirks.
• One game of Hats involved Wayne wearing a George W. Bush mask, then sitting there gibbering like an idiot, and finally taking off his shoe and bonking his own head.
  • Still on Wayne: the novelty of a black dude doing a convincing Scottish accent hasn't quite worn down, as Team Fortress 2 proves.
• Wayne going from Let's Make a Date to Let's Make a Deal.
• Any Pinocchio jokes from the UK run fall under this now (see the Running Gag page).
• Did Steve Oedekerk watch this particular clip?
• Ryan's played a man aging in reverse a couple of times.
• Towards the end of this clip is a game of Expert, where Ryan plays an expert on karate and pigs. And then Josie gets the idea to mention that the interview is about a movie with karate pigs.
• Towards the end of this clip, a game of Stand, Sit, Bend, where Clive has designated the scene as 'cowboys on the range'. Greg, saddled with the bending position, deliberately posed suggestively in Clive's direction. Bear in mind that they're cowboys.
• All those fat jokes about Drew Carey... Who's laughing NOW?
  • People always ask me, "Hey, Drew, did you lose weight?"
  • "I'm Drew Carey, and yes, I have lost weight, thanks for asking."
• Wayne's second "tune" "Songs of the Bus Driver" inadvertently predated dance mixes to spoken words.
• Stephen Fry's "Parthenon" line in Questions Only actually came back to haunt him on the set of QI.
• One "Scenes From A Hat" suggestion was not long after "Fear Factor" debuted, what a celebrity version of the show would be like. Whose Line's parody was stuff like Drew not having cards to use to know what to say. But soon "Fear Factor" did do a couple famous people themed episodes, but in the traditional style of the show, like Donny Osmond in a bug filled case.
• The "Scenes From A Hat" suggestion on the original U.S. run had "What Colin dreams about" and the other 3 guys come out pretending to be bald and screaming in horror after they did all the bald jokes against Colin. By the time the new version came on U.S. tv, Wayne has shaved his head. And sometimes one of the rotating fourth players will be another bald guy like Gary Anthony Williams or Keegan Michael Key.
• Another "Scenes From A Hat" features Ryan playing President Carol Channing. Funny, but no more hilarious today then it was then. However, Brad walks out with him playing a sign language interpreter. Ryan's "who the hell are you?" comment really cements it.
• One "Scenes From A Hat" suggestion was weird things to see posted on highway warning signs. This was way before it was a trend to hack into those signs to make spoof messages like "Nazi zombies ahead!".
• Drew once said points don't matter, like football in Los Angeles. The audience groans, but he says, "You don't have a team, do you?". It took a long time, but now L.A. has two - the Rams moved there for the 2016 season, and the Chargers move in for the 2017 season.
• One session of Props that wound up in the UK Clip Show eps (here) involved a massive cone that covered Ryan's head and shoulders. It was meant to be silly, but Ryan going completely quiet and motionless made it look rather unnerving, even back then.
• One early UK session of Film Dubbing had Clive giving the scenario "two roommates in a flat", when the actual clip was really a documentary with two presenters. Thanks to the clip's format of addressing the audience, Ryan and Greg quickly turned it into a Confession Cam joke, predating The Real World.
• The Newsflash game involving the rat infestation has Colin start off by saying "it started with some bad soup!" The plot of Ratatouille kicks off when Remy tries to fix Linguini's bad soup.
• During Superheroes, Colin is given the name Presidential Candidate Man. The world crisis he is to solve is "no teleprompters". Fast forward 10 years, and one of the most popular targets of parody for President Barack Obama is his perceived over-reliance on teleprompters.
• One of Ryan's lesser-used running gags was to acknowledge that he looked like a grown-up Doogie Howser. This was during the time when Neil Patrick Harris' career post-Doogie Howser wasn't relevant to Hollywood. A year after the last episode of Whose Line aired on ABC, NPH would become legen... wait for it... dary!
• Early in the UK series, Tony Slattery thought to take a session of "Authors" Off the Rails by choosing to tell his parts of the tale in the style of 'My Little Pony'. It's doubtful he knew at the time just how big that then-obscure children's franchise would become.
• Here's an in-show example: during Colin's Newsflash on clips of himself, he famously said "It all started with a badly-timed bald joke!" A minute after the game ended, Drew was joking around about it when Colin started giggling out of the blue, and said "Oh! I said the bald joke thing, too!"
• In an interview, Colin once told a story about a family of Whose Line fans he and Wayne Brady met the day before a taping who were planning on coming. As they left, the older lady in the family complimented Wayne and called him "a nice Christian boy". The next day, the family showed up and said older lady is picked for Song Styles. She was none other than "Lee the Lunch Lady". And now you know why Colin practically falls out of his seat with laughter from the chosen style of the game onwards.
• Just think about every time Wayne Brady made a UPN joke...and now he'll be part of the Whose Line? revival on the network that took over UPN.
• After all those bald jokes in the first version of the U.S. edition, Colin's no longer the one with the least scalp hair come the second version.
  • Noted in a "Scenes From A Hat" sketch from early in the revival, where the prompt involved people who shouldn't be promoting hair-care products - Colin dragged the now-bald Wayne Brady and guest performer Gary Anthony Williams (who is also bald) onto the stage with him, all three staring solemnly into the camera.
• The revival features an episode guest starring Robbie Amell, who played an employee of Greg Proops' character in True Jackson, VP.
• Ho Yay must run in the Mochrie bloodline.
  • It’s not Ho anymore.
• Any time Colin mentions his children is funnier thanks to Kinley.
• In a series 9 episode of the UK version, Colin Mochrie brings up blue whales... while right next to Stephen Fry.
• One of the responses to the "Scenes from a Hat" prompt "The dreams of Colin Mochrie" was his fellow cast-mates screaming after becoming bald. In the 2013 revival, Wayne is now balder than Colin.
• A game of "Duet" to Robbie Amell leaves Jeff Davis questioning if there's 4 or 5 members of One Direction. There were 5 when they filmed that in 2014, but in 2015, Zayn left and they decided to continue as a four man group.
• Turns out Ryan's constant use of the name 'Gary' summoned an actual Gary - Gary Anthony Williams, the new Ensemble Dark Horse.
• One game of "Secret" in UK season 9 was about The Lone Ranger, where Ryan as Tonto has an Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping moment, causing Colin (the Lone Ranger, natch) to start "rubbing off" all of Tonto's "makeup", revealing him to be a white dude. Fast forward to 2013...
• One "Scenes from a Hat" suggestion was "times you wish you could fast-forward Real Life".
• One Weird Newscasters has Colin preaching about how people are shackled by the conventions of clothes.
• One "Song Styles" has Drew picking a professor from the audience, then joking about him running a meth lab. Sounds like a really popular idea.
• This game of Sound Effects, about the story of Noah, has Ryan telling Colin to find two unicorns, and Colin claiming that there's a sheep with a cone attached to its head trying to pass for a unicorn. Well...
• One game of "Party Quirks" had Ryan as "All the characters in a gay western". What does that remind you of?
• In one game of "Scenes From a Hat", one suggestion was "Naked photos you wouldn't want to see on the internet". Wayne walked out and said "Hi, I'm Bea Arthur...". Unusual then, but in 2013, it's worth $1.9 million.
• Another "Scenes From a Hat" featured "celebrities who shouldn't do rap videos." One of Brad's offerings was Stephen Hawking. Some may think that this is where Ken Lawrence got his idea for MC Hawking, just to spite Brad.
• During this game of "Whose Line" parodying Beauty and the Beast, Ryan does a dance similar to the "Gangnam Style" dance by Psy.
• Stephen Colbert played the anchor during "Weird Newscasters" on his episode.
• Also from Colbert's appearance, one of the most ridiculous Scene to Rap games of all time. He's massively improved since then.
• Wayne guest-hosted The Late Late Show in 2015. Near the end of his first episode, he performed a song, the glare from the stage light reflected by his now-bald head.
• The first playing of the Millionaire Show involved Brad's repeated use of "Richard Nixon" as a potential answer. A few weeks later, the first ever person to win in the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? franchise was asked which president appeared on the show Laugh In. Guess what the answer was?
• Steve Carell auditioned for the show but didn't make it - but he's been a "Weird Newscaster" twice already!
• When Wayne appeared on Nick Cannon's improv show, someone stole Wayne's rhyme during a rap game. This prompted Wayne to compare the offender to MC Hammer, who is famous for doing the same.
• A 2014 episode featured them doing "World's Worst commercial". Gary Anthony Williams (at the time, quite heavyset) joked, "Believe it or not.... I used to be fat!" The 2015 episodes have started airing, and Gary has clearly lost a lot of weight during the break!
  • Then Gary gets cast in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, as Bebop... meaning he gains back twice his own weight.
• The Les Misérables number which shoehorned in a pregnant woman for drama - turns out Key & Peele did that already. Too bad Key wasn't there that week.
• The "Narrate" set in the White House featured a joke where Colin narrated, "There didn't seem to be much security around, I just walked right in." Funny when you consider that in 2014, one person managed to get past the security and enter the White House before being caught.
• When Scenes from a Hat had the suggestion "lines you wouldn't hear in a love song", Ryan went up and sang "Soon I'll be a girl like you...", which comes a few days after Caitlyn Jenner's much-publicised gender reassignment.
• The Newsflash of wrestling clips. This one might be best appreciated as dark humor for wrestling fans, since the footage is from WCW, and all of Greg and Ryan's references are for WWE. At the time of the airing of this episode, WCW was on the verge of collapse, and about to be purchased by WWE.
• The show makes a huge leap in LGBT representation with a Newsflash of kissing scenes, with same-sex kissing mixed among the more normal ones (plus a few reminders that the show itself is guilty). Just a few days later, the Supreme Court rules on gay marriage nationwide.
• Stephen Fry's last appearance on the UK version had one "Number of Words" based on Romeo and Juliet, which ended with Stephen randomly breaking character and saying "call Bernstein, I think there could be a musical in this." Simon Pegg had the same idea.
• The old US series lampshaded all the Ho Yay with Wayne announcing that "sometime tonight, I'm humping someone in the audience." It doesn't happen till the third revival season.
• One game of "Hollywood Director" in the revival had Ryan revive his John Wayne impression, only for Colin to point out that "the kids are gonna need Google with you." Surprisingly, The Fine Brothers find a few that won't!
• One game of "The Millionaire Show" had Brad as the host mistakenly naming Cathy Lee Crosby instead of Kathie Lee Gifford. Someone must be out to set him straight, as Kathie Lee Gifford actually appears in an episode with Brad in the third revival season! As a matter of fact, pretty much every time they joke about Kathie Lee Gifford can go into their own big fat folder right here.
• The original run of the series made a fair amount of referencing the fact gays can't be legally married in the United States. Then in 2015, the Supreme Court changed all that...
• All the jokes about Star Wars as well, now that Colin actually has a daughter whose birth name was Luke (she now goes by Kinley).
• "Hey, I didn't mean to cook your dog..."
• The second revival season had one "Hollywood Director" where Ryan made a very convincing duck call sound - the third season would have an authority of sorts on the matter, Willie Robertson from Duck Dynasty, while Ryan operating a real duck call leads to Epic Fail.
• One game of "Questions Only" set in a teen soap opera has Ryan coming up with the sports team name "the Wildcats". Probably inspired by a plot point from Speed, but it's funny that a Genre Throwback to teen dramas some years later would use that name as well.
• One "Film Dub" was about a black-and-white tokusatsu with a "monster" with a huge eye on its stomach (Evil Brain From Outer Space), which is especially funny as Kamen Rider Ghost also premiered that week.
• Wayne got the chance to make up an Adele song about getting evicted - now Adele has a song that goes "Hello from the outside..."
• In this game of Press Conference from the first U.S show, Colin played a retiring Santa Claus. When Ryan asks him who's going to take over the job, Colin responds that he is considering Donald Trump. The joke was funny back then, but it is so much funnier today in light of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
  • And then there's an "unlikely presidential slogan to get you elected" prompt in Scenes on a Hat, to which Wayne responded "I love booty!". Fast forward to 2016 presidential campaign and infamous "grab 'em by the pussy!" comment by Trump...
  • From the same game of "Press Conference", when Ryan asked Colin whether he'd move somewhere warmer, Colin says "I was thinking maybe Mexico, because I like it there.". Trump's most noted campaign proposal was building a wall between the American and Mexican borders.
• One Weird Newscaster had Wayne as the sports commentator who's secretly moonlighting as drag queen "Senorita Negracita". In the fourth revival season, Wayne will miss out on some eps for the first time since the early US run, due to his role in the stage musical Kinky Boots. As a drag queen.
• One game of Scenes From a Hat involved "unlikely causes to donate money to." Ryan went with getting Drew Carey a third show. Even ignoring Drew being the host on The Price Is Right, Drew later went on to have Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza. Plus, Ryan was on that show as well, making it the third show Drew and Ryan have both been on.
• All the "Drew has two shows" jokes get funnier when you consider Aisha Tyler, his replacement, has three shows
• One episode had Drew decide to "send 5 million points to Canada to teach them how to rap". Must have worked. Maybe too well.
• One Scenes from a Hat had the prompt "If Sesame Street was incorporated into other shows," leading Wayne to play Elmo beating the rival clans in Game of Thrones. Both an example in and of itself (Wayne was on Sesame Street in 2003) and funny when you remember that in 2015, Sesame Street did a spoof of Game of Thrones. Then, in 2019, the crossover happened.
• During Scenes from a Hat Colin suggested that the thing the kids in The Blair Witch Project were really running from was their fear of a "crappy sequel". Cue Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a severe case of Sequelitis.
• One "Scenes From a Hat" bit was "Bad animals to have as pets." Brad's idea: "Here, Velociraptor!" (And then gets "mauled" by Colin as the raptor.) Tell that to Chris Pratt.
• One "Let's Make a Date" from the old show has Colin as a "medieval torture victim", and when Chip asks a question about having children Colin just shrieks "You know I can't anymore!" Basically Colin just predicted a whole story arc from Game of Thrones.
• During the old US series Drew claimed that "just when you thought Will & Grace was the gayest show on tv, along comes Whose Line is it Anyway". It looks like Will and Grace is out to take back that title, as they're getting a revival series just a few years after Whose Line did.
• One "Scenes from a Hat" in the revival season had Wayne poking at Steve Harvey's infamous Miss Universe announcement flub, except it wasn't as recent as they were hoping since this game was leftover footage from a previous season - but thanks to the 2017 winner announcement flub at the Academy Awards, the joke was relevant again.
• During one game of 'Whose Line' that references Beauty And The Beast, Colin (Beauty) asks Ryan (The Beast) how old he is. Ryan responds "32". Years later, Dan Stevens was 32 when he was cast to play the role in Disney's live-action remake.
• One game of World's Worst had Colin cheerily suggesting "let's hear that Yentl soundtrack one more time!" Deadpool 2, starring fellow Canadian Ryan Reynolds, would deliberately milk one song from the Yentl soundtrack for a Running Gag.
• In Jeff Davis' first episode on the American Whose Line, one Scenes from a Hat suggestion was "If people celebrated mundane events as if they were touchdowns," with Jeff going "It's a boy! Yeah!", spiking the "ball" at the ground. After getting a touchdown in a 2018 NFL game, Juju Smith-Shuster of the Pittsburgh Steelers celebrated by using the ball to act out a childbirth.
• The first episode of season 7 featured Night of the Blood Beast as the movie clip on "Film Dub". Coincidentally, the same movie was used as the season 7 premiere on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
• Keegan-Michael Key became the last guy to get a Bill Cosby reference into the show before the rape allegations finally made it to court. Now that the sentencing has provided some resolution, another new player, Gary Anthony Williams, gets the jump on the show by playing Bill on Epic Rap Battles of History first.
  • Worth noting at this point is that Gary actually has very few lines in "George Carlin vs Richard Pryor" - skip forward to the 2020 season and Ryan decides to name Battle Rapping for a song style, which finally gives Gary room to cut loose, even holding his own against Wayne.
• In the U.K. series, one "Film Dub" had Ryan, Colin, and Stephen Frost dubbing over an old martial arts film. Only a few years later, an entire film would do this.
  • Similarly, in the "Whose Line" set in a Star Wars scene, Ryan (playing Obi-Wan) wanted to be called "Helen" from then on. The villain in Kung Pow wanted to be called "Betty" instead of "Master Pain".
• During the Drew Carey run, for one "Scenes From a Hat" category "Things that make the audience boo", Jeff Davis says "And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to...Keanu Reeves." and the audience boos. Such a scene would get a round of applause today with Keanu Reeves being something of a Sacred Cow since The New '10s, making the joke very ironic.
• At some point the guys started a Running Gag about Aisha not only being secretly a man but having a Gag Penis - fast forward to the 2019-20 anime season, and two different animes reference the fact that hyenas can be biologically female and still have a faux-penis.
• One rendition of Superheroes from the ABC run centered around Colin being given the moniker of "Captain Obvious" by an audience member. The episode in question aired years before TV Tropes launched and the Hotels.com mascot of that name debuted.
• In one British episode aired in 1995, Greg Proops failed to guess that Tony Slattery was pretending to be Noddy, causing the latter to ask him "Do you not have Noddy in America?", which he responded to by being confused at the character's name. The U.S. did get Noddy 3 years after that episode was aired.
• One game of "Three Headed Broadway Singer" in the old US show came up with the song "They Threw It Away", including the line "my mother never called me a good son". Fast forward to 2020, and Saturday Night Live has a parody of Gen-Z white boy rap titled "YEET", with the line "You never loved me mom".
• From the original US run, in one Scenes From a Hat category "Things You Shouldn't Do After Heavy Drinking", Ryan imitates an airplane pilot. Years later that's the premise of the film Flight.
• In one round of "Song Styles", Wayne sings to a volleyball coach in the style of Cab Calloway. Two decades later, he'd voice the Calloway-inspired villain King Dice in The Cuphead Show!.
• From a playing of Scenes from a Hat in the original US run:
  Drew: "First Drafts of Famous Movie Lines."
  Colin: "Fredzilla! Fredzilla!"
• In the aftermath of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards and the huge media circus that followed, some people began referencing one of the most memorable quotes in Whose Line history, "It all started with a badly-timed bald joke!"
• Listing individual examples of Wayne's Ho Yay moments with the others would be too numerous for one page, so let's just say any time Wayne kisses another male cast member, or especially any time he invoked Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today? after he came out as pansexual in 2023.
• In episode 7x24, when Drew brings down two audience members for Sound Effects, one woman, Priscilla, has big glasses, long dark hair, a red sweater and jeans. She'd look exactly like she was doing a cosplay of Linda Belcher from Bob's Burgers, if Whose Line didn't predate that show by the better part of a decade. (And the name of the other volunteer from the audience? Linda.)
• In the first US version, there was the "Scenes From A Hat" suggestion "If famous films had product placement", with Colin saying "Rosebud... the last word in sleds!". In 2003, Chilean television screened the original Star Wars trilogy, but stitched commercials into the movies themselves to avoid having commercial breaks. The results were hilariously surreal.