Brian Regan

Brian Regan
Brian Joseph Reganis an American stand-up comedian who uses observational, sarcastic, and self-deprecating humor. His performances are relatively clean as he refrains from profanity and off-color humor. Regan's material typically covers everyday events, such as shipping a package with UPS and a visit to an optometrist. Regan makes frequent references to childhood, including little league baseball, grade school spelling bees, and science projects. Body language and facial expressions make his stand-up act atypically physical. His clean, off-center humor has been...
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth2 October 1957
CityMiami, FL
Every comedian works differently. Some comedians might do just observational stuff and they don't do anything personal, and other people.. everything they do is personal and they don't do any observational stuff at all. There's no right or wrong, it's just that everybody picks their own approach.
I'm capable offstage of having some dark, twisted thoughts but the kind of things I like to do onstage are just more conceptual and I don't even think of them as being clean. I don't sit down and think, "Man, I'm going to come up with some lily-white comedy!" They're just things that I like to talk about, and then at the end of the day you think, "Well, I guess that was clean" but it's not the focus.
A lot of the kind of comedy that I do comes out of real human moments. For them to work, they have to be truthful kinds of things that people in the audience can go, "Yes, I've experienced that myself!"
I'm always excited about my upcoming shows. I love what I do; I feel very lucky to be able to do what I do, and I never get tired of it. Every time I'm backstage before a show and I feel the murmur of the crowd, it's just incredibly exciting. And I consider myself very fortunate to be able to do this for a job. It's a great life.
I wanted to do the comic strip. I tried to get it syndicated, and I sent some examples to a syndication company, and they sent me a rejection letter! I wasn't smart enough at the time to realize you shouldn't let rejection letters stop you. I thought that rejection letter meant I was not allowed to be a cartoonist in this world, so I put the rejection letter down and said, well, I'll be a stand-up comedian.
I don't take jokes from other people. It's really not cool to steal jokes from anybody. It's not cool to steal anything from anybody. Jokes are no different.
Many comedians consider themselves to be cutting edge. But why do we have to use the knife for the analogy. Let's use the spoon. I like to consider myself the big bowl-like area of the spoon that holds all the stuff you like.
I don't always see humor in things. Especially when I smash my pinky toe into a coffee table leg in the middle of the night. But sometimes I'll see things, or experience things, that make me go, "Huh, maybe that's a bit."
Relevance is kind of a weird thing. If one does topical material, it makes sense to want to be relevant. But if someone talks about donut sprinkles, it's not quite as important. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court makes a decision outlawing donut sprinkles.
It's hard to program a computer to make jokes. The brain needs to do something here; the brain needs to come up with something bizarre to make something funny.
I'm honored that other comedians like what I do. That means the world to me. But at the same time when I'm on stage I'm not just trying to make the comedians laugh - I'm also trying to make the audience laugh. I want to make everybody laugh.
I just tend to think about everyday things for my onstage act. Actually you know what I like to talk about just the absolute most - the more mundane the subject matter, the more interesting it is to me.
Some people look at creamed corn and ask, 'Why?' I look at creamed corn and ask, 'Why not?'
I don't know. I'd be a lot better off if I would've studied more when I was growing up, you know?