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
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.
Politicians have a lot to deal with these days. It's a different world. You know who I feel bad for? Arab Americans who truly want to get into crop dusting. Could be their life long dream, and every time they ask for a pamphlet, all hell breaks loose.
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.
The bigger the show, the weirder it is.
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.
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.
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?