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
I saw something in the store the other day that I don't understand: that peanut butter and jelly in the same jar. Is there a point to that? I mean, I'm lazy-but I wanna meet the guy who needs that. Some guy going, "You know, I could go for a sandwich-but, uh, I'm not gonna open two jars. I can't be opening and closing all kinds of jars. Cleaning, who knows how many knives!?"
Sometimes you'll play, like, a large venue - maybe an outdoor venue or something - where it's so big that you can see all of the disinterested people. You see the audience, but then behind the audience you see people eating ice cream, going for a walk.
I like the honesty of standup comedy. People don't fake laugh. If they're truly laughing at you, you know they like you.
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.
Hooked on Phonics worked for me
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 try my jokes onstage. The only way to really find out if something is going to work is to try it on stage, and I try to be careful and bookend something new with a strong bit before and a strong bit afterwards. But it's fun to run on virgin snow. I like that feeling onstage of creating new footprints and not knowing what's going to happen.
You see weird things driving... I've never understood log trucks. Sometimes you'll be out on the highway, you see two big giant trucks loaded up with logs, and they pass each other on the highway... I don't understand that. I mean, if they need logs over there... and they need 'em over there, you'd think a phone call would save 'em a whole lot of trouble.
The funnest jokes for me to tell are the ones that are the newest. So I'm just constantly motivated to keep my eyes and ears open and have new stuff.
I wasn't expecting to really draw in respected comedians but it's going to happen along the way and I'm truly honored by that.
I do a few jokes about the economy but from an everyday person perspective. People like to laugh, and they especially like to laugh during difficult circumstances.
The only way I'd want to do something in television would be if it was about how I think as a comedian. I'd need to be able to be a creator. That's what I enjoy - I enjoy coming up with comedy, so it'd be very difficult for me to be sitting in a room and have somebody come in and say, "Here's your script! Learn these lines!" That's not fun. At least not for me.
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.
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.