When Ryan Stiles was growing up, and up (and up--he's 6-foot-5) in Vancouver, British Columbia, the trajectory of his future appeared to be strictly vertical. A good student who played for his high school basketball team, Stiles seemed destined to get the higher education that his father, a fisherman, never had. So it came as a considerable shock when he dropped out of high school just months short of graduation to become a comedian.

Stand-up presented Stiles with many new challenges, not least among these was learning to duck. "When I started doing stand-up, I used to work in a lot of bad strip clubs in British Columbia," he says. "After having beer caps flung at me and being threatened onstage, I learned to take a 'Go out and have fun' attitude, rather than a 'Gee, I hope I don't bomb' attitude. Because you were going to bomb at those places anyway, so you might as well have fun."

In 1978, Stiles began to experiment with improvisational comedy, and that led to a spot with the famed Second City troupe in Toronto, which he joined in 1986. Stiles had tried to break into acting for years without success, but improv finally provided him with the missing link. "When I was doing stand-up, I used to audition for stuff, but I didn't believe I could do it," he says. "After I got into Second City, I gained all kinds of confidence."

He had already been doing the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? for six seasons when he read for the part of Lewis on the pilot of The Drew Carey Show. It was, in many ways, the ideal show for Stiles, who had often had to stoop to conquer in the world of episodic comedy. "In the early days I used to end a lot of auditions with them saying, 'Excuse me, how tall are you again?'" says the 39-year-old Stiles, who has a 4-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter with his wife of eight years, Pat. But costar Diedrich Bader and Carey are 6-foot-2 and 5-foot-11, respectively. "It's freakish," says Stiles, who, for the first time in his career, was not.

He quickly proved his value to the show by improvising its very first line. As Drew walked over to Lewis and Oswald with several beers, Stiles suddenly deadpanned, "And that's why the French don't wash." Playing along, Bader simply replied, "Huh," as if they had reached the conclusion of some fascinating disquisition of Gallic hygiene. "We got a huge laugh out of that," Stiles says. Just as important, The Drew Carey Show's take-no-prisoners style of comedy has been set.

***Note: TV Guide mispelled Diedrich ("Dietrich"). Granted, it's not the easiest name to spell, but... come ON!!!