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
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. And who knows how many knives!
You can poke fun at some pretty difficult circumstances, and it's just a way to pop the bubble. I don't do that thing onstage usually, but offstage sometimes I might.
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.
I am happy doing standup so I don't ever want to stop doing it. But I wouldn't mind venturing off and doing other things that are creative.
When you're onstage, it's a communication technique when you make people laugh. You're communicating. You're communicating with other human beings and when they laugh you know that you're connecting. Laughing is an honest reaction and it's something that I can trust, and I love that feeling of knowing that I connected.
As long as I can make that audience one thing, one unit, then I'm okay with it. But, sometimes, the bigger the audience, the weirder it gets.
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.
The bigger the show, the weirder it is.
The government will pay certain farmers to not grow corn. Wow. Where's my check? That'd be great. "Hey, what do you do for a living?" "Well, I don't grow corn. Get up at the crack of noon, make sure there's no corn growing. I'm gonna get up early tomorrow. And not plow. You know, we used to not grow tomatoes-but there's more money in not growing corn."
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.