Brian Regan

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Comedian's making it without sex jokes or sitcom
By Rich Copley rcopley@herald-leader.com
September 26th 2008

Back in the 1990s, Brian Regan was making his way through the comedy club circuit, dreaming of graduating to theater gigs. The road to those big stages seemed to go through television, specifically sitcoms that had his colleagues such as Jerry Seinfeld playing to thousands of people a night across the country.

"I did want to get a sitcom — a lot more so a number of years ago — because it seemed to be the finish line, it seemed to represent whether you were a good comedian," says Regan, who used to open for Seinfeld on theater dates. "When everybody started getting them, people would come up to me after shows and say, 'How come you don't have a sitcom?,' and I'd be thinking, 'Am I not at the finish line yet?' So, I wanted one because I like my comedy, and I wanted it to be rewarded."

But as Regan's career rolled along, he started to develop a following of his own and started to play those theaters as a headliner, without having to tape 22 episodes a year to build his name recognition. "At this point in my career, I like what I do, I like the autonomy of being a comedian and not having to run anything by anybody, and I'm doing what I always wanted to do," Regan says.

Friday night, Regan's theater tour brings him to the Singletary Center for the Arts, where he'll play to one of his best audiences: college students. Again, Regan is breaking a rule here. The assumption is students favor raunchy comedians of whom many of their parents would never approve. But Regan has made his name with clean material that muses on mundane aspects of life, like the fact that serving sizes on nutrition labels tend to be much smaller than what people normally eat.

"I'm in the store reading the Fig Newtons label," Regan says in one routine. "Everything looked fine, the fat content and everything. I looked at the serving size: Two cookies. Who the hell eats two cookies? I eat Fig Newtons by the sleeve. Two sleeves is a serving size. I open two sleeves and eat them like a tree chipper," he says, making a sound like a chipper grinding up a tree trunk. "When I first started, I had some jokes that were blue or dirty, but it was a very small percentage of my act," Regan says. "I started thinking, I'm already 95 percent clean, and why be 95 percent when you can be 100 percent. So I thought, 'Why not be 100 percent and see what happens?' "

What happened was he started getting a lot of positive feedback. "It was like, 'Oh, my gosh, it was so funny, and we're blown away by how clean it was, and we can bring our friends, and I'm going to tell my aunt and my sister,' and all of these people that I guess don't ever go out to shows."

Of course, though he's not a sitcom star, you can see Regan on TV. Right now, his second stand-up special for Comedy Central, The Epitome of Hyperbole, is airing. Again, for what has become a highly political network with Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Lewis Black, Regan avoids getting overtly political. "I'm a fence-straddler," Regan says. But he'll talk about "things in general that are true for both sides. For instance, I do a bit about the negative campaign ads and the sinister voice-over guy they use. I get a kick out of how dark and evil they can make the voice-over guy sound when he's saying things that really aren't that bad."

Friday, Regan could be up against politics as the presidential candidates, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, are scheduled to square off in their first debate at 9 p.m. "Maybe I'll stay home and watch the debate," Regan says with a laugh, when reminded of the conflict. That doesn't seem likely, though. Regan's having too much fun doing what he always wanted to do.

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I don't usually like clean comedians, as it always seems that they're not really giving it everything, but his stuff is pretty funny.

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An interview with comedian Brian Regan
Friday, December 05, 2008
By DUSTIN SCHOOF
The Express-Times

Brian Regan says he's not comfortable unless somebody is laughing. "I love the truthfulness of a laugh. You know whether people like something," Regan says over the phone. "People can fake applaud and fake it in other social interactions, but it's hard to fake a hearty laugh. You know when you're on stage and people are laughing, you think this is happening, this is real."

Critics, fans and fellow comedians have been doing a lot of laughing at Regan's expense. Regan's brand of quirky, often manic, observational humor has made him a cult favorite on the stand-up circuit. His work has drawn praise from critics, fellow comedians and even David Letterman. He's also one of the few comics able to get laughs without venturing too far into off-color territory. Regan refrains from vulgarity in his act and sticks to the things he knows best, whether it's waxing poetic on NASCAR pit crews, questioning the need for directions on a box of Pop Tarts or recalling a trip to the emergency room.

"That just happens to be how I think," Regan says. "I like to do stuff about everyday things, and then because of that, it's also by design. I don't like to faction off my audience. Even though I'm married with kids, I mean I touch briefly on that, but I don't want to it to be like, 'Oh, it's a comedy about being a dad or about being a husband.' I want it to be a comedy about being a person. I choose my topics on purpose. They're ridiculously generic. It's fun for me to find comedy about the most mundane things."

Regan is touring in support of his 2008 Comedy Central special and DVD, "The Epitome of Hyperbole." Regan chatted recently about being animated, coonskin hats and hanging out in moon craters.

You're known for being very open with your fans. What was the strangest fan encounter you've had?
I was on stage one time during a show and there was this guy in the audience wearing a coonskin hat. You don't see that a lot. This guy got up in middle of my show and went, I'm assuming to the restroom, so you can't help but note that. A few minutes later he comes back, walking toward the steps to the stage. In my mind I'm still doing the show, but there's that part of my brain going is he friend or foe? The guy climbs up on stage and he's this big burly guy with a coonskin hat. Now if it was a skinny guy with a coonskin hat, I would have made fun of him. But a big burly guy, you just go, "That's a cool hat."

You were featured on the cartoon "Dr. Katz." What was that experience like and do you plan on returning to animation or TV?
It was a blast to do "Dr. Katz." The first (episode) came out and I was like I'm gonna get to see me as a cartoon and they showed me on the couch and I was like, "Man, they drew me fat." If there was ever an easier way to lose weight, you know? Can't they lose one of those lines or something? I know you're supposed to exaggerate, but exaggerate in the other direction.

I would like to (return to TV), but it would have to be the right situation. People have two different kinds of quests with stand-up, some want to be a star or have their comedy be the star. Me, I'm more of the latter. I like doing my comedy. (Being famous) is not what drives me.

Your humor has been described as universal and more on the cleaner side. What do you consider off-limits?
I think everything is fair game for somebody. Different comedians are into different things. Some people are on the raunchier side. Stuff gets lampooned or looked at from a perspective that other people might not look at it. For me it's weird because I do occasionally hit on a topic here or there, where you feel the audience go, "Whoa, wait a minute." I just hope they understand as a comedian I do have a point of view and an opinion on things. I'm not intending to offend. What's weird is if someone's superblue or superdirty, with me being somewhat clean I can hit on something where the audience is like, "Whoa, hey there partner" and I'm like what, so now I'm handcuffed to do clean jokes?

I remember reading a preview of my show once and the guy who wrote it just listed the topics I talk about, but he didn't include any of the jokes. I couldn't imagine anyone being excited by this. I tried to envision a guy in his pajamas reading it and going, "Hey honey, you'll never believe what kind of comedy is rolling into town this week. You know how we eat food? He talks about that." I was reading it and going, "Man I'm bored. I don't even want to do my own show."

Your first DVD was titled "I Walked on the Moon." If you really could go to the moon, what would you bring with you?
I would bring a camera because I wouldn't want to be trying to tell people I went to the moon and have them be like, "Yeah, right." (Yelling) "Hey check out the moon, that's me in the crater. I'm holding a moon rock. Quit laughing at me." I'd need some kind of documentation device. It can't be me just taking some Post-It notes. I don't think people would believe that.

You've recorded a CD and three comedy specials, what's next?
There are talks I might be coming out with a pamphlet. I don't know yet if it's going to be color or black and white. You'll open it up and it'll be either a three-sided or two-side pamphlet. Everybody does a book tour or DVD tour. I want to do a pamphlet tour. We're at the final stages, I don't know the release date yet, but we're very proud of it.

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to watch every episode of Dr Katz click HERE

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Brian Regan, comedy's ordinary superstar
The quiet rise of comedy's Brian Regan
Mar 22, 2009
Garnet Fraser
Toronto Star

Brian Regan is nobody special. A husband and father, a comedian who never parlayed his material into the wider fame of a sitcom, or movies, or a massive hit record. A touring standup whose tour is garnering no headlines and whose big break, by his own admission, never came. Also, Brian Regan is a huge star: the subject of several comedy specials in the U.S.; a man who has been on David Letterman's show more than 20 times; a man whose two shows this Saturday at the Music Hall have been sold out for weeks.

"I'm like in this bizarre under-the-radar world," Regan says over the phone. "There's a game my son plays called Katamari (Damacy), and that's how it's like for me. I just keep rolling along and picking up more and more people."

Like that Japanese video game's sticky ball, that rambles over bigger and bigger items, traps them and adds them to himself, his career has accumulated into something massive. Maybe that's because average people can relate to his material, which often conveys a man struggling with his lack of sophistication. Here's a moment from his most recent special, The Epitome of Hyperbole:

"I recently went to three different ballets, and I loved trying to figure out how to like those a little bit. (Audience laughs.) Three different ballets, and they all had the same story. So I wrote a ballet. I'm gonna submit it. This is the ballet I wrote: this man meets this woman and he wants to marry her, but he can't marry her because she's already getting ready to marry somebody else. So they all dance around for a couple of hours. (Big laughter.) I put in parentheses, `Do a lot of that up-on-the-toe business.'"

It's engagingly sold by an affable everyman; Regan's website describes him as a "dorm-room favorite," and it's easy to imagine the boyish 50-year-old being right at home at the dorm if he were there in the flesh. The Florida native's persona may not be hugely distinctive ("I want my comedy to be famous; I don't care about me," he says) but Regan's observational, clean material bring to mind the comedy's biggest name, whose career arc he once hoped to emulate:

"I got lucky enough to open for Jerry Seinfeld several times while his sitcom was on the air," Regan explains on the phone, "and it was such fun to play those theatres. I thought if I had a sitcom I could do that, but I wanted do it not for the sake of the sitcom, but to have people that focused on what you're doing ... I find I can actually tone it down in a theatre, try something subtle; at a comedy club you're competing with blenders and cheeseburgers."

That's the world he comes out of, having worked his way up from toiling a busboy at the Comic Strip in Fort Lauderdale, to get brief, awkward shots at the mike. Then, one New Year's Eve, the emcee was doing badly enough to summon Regan from his tray to face the crowd instead.

"I don't know how or why, but I made fun of being a busboy – I did very self-deprecating stuff then – and they just started paying attention and laughing. That was the time I'd come back to later, remembering `okay, you know how to do this. You're good enough to be comedian.'"

So theatres are what he plays now, having last graced a Toronto stage at the Winter Garden in 2007. He wants his fans to know that his show's now almost entirely different from what they saw there or on the Epitome special. When he hears that local boy Russell Peters has sold out the Air Canada Centre for two June shows despite incorporating some old material, Regan suggests he might do the same:

"Come see me – I'm doing Russell Peters' stuff! His stuff from my mouth, plus new stuff from my mouth, on a less expensive ticket."

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