The Portland Press Herald / The Maine Sunday Telegram

March 18

New bits, fresh laughs: That's what Brian Regan lives for

By Ray Routhier rrouthier@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

This may sound funny coming from a comedian, but Brian Regan thinks laughs can get boring.

"As fun as it is to kill when you're on stage, laughs can get boring if you know they're coming," said Regan, 51, who will perform at Portland's Merrill Auditorium on Sunday. "I love the feeling when I'm on stage and I'm about to do a new bit. When you're not 100 percent sure where the laughs are, that's when it's exciting."

The constant desire to push himself, to be different, is one of the things that has made Regan one of the country's top stand-up comedians over the last decade or so. He's had three specials on the Comedy Central cable channel over the past few years, is a frequent guest on "The Late Show with David Letterman," and sells out concert halls around the country.

But his desire to challenge himself also makes Regan a hard comic to define.

That's because Regan doesn't have a gimmick or a constant stage persona. He says whenever people start trying to define him, he finds himself writing material that veers away from that definition.

"I had read once that in my stories, I always feel like an idiot, or that I always prowl around hunched over," said Regan, who lives in Las Vegas with his wife and two children, ages 6 and 11. "I don't want to be a one-trick pony."

If there's is a constant in Regan's career, which dates to the early 1980s, it's that his material is generally cleaner than many of his contemporaries in the world of stand-up. And his observational humor has an everyman quality that most people can relate to.

"There are comedians who work dirty who I think are great, but it's just not the way I like to work," said Regan. "I don't like to paint myself in a corner. I'm just a person going through life, experiencing the world, and that's what my comedy is about, the human condition."

Sounds pretty tame, but then Regan adds: "I think everyone fakes their way through life trying to come off more together than they are, even though they're really thinking they're not qualified for their job, for a social situation. And I think I tap into that."

Regan was the fourth child in a family of eight, growing up in Miami. His father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker, but he says everyone in his family was funny. Family time consisted of everyone making everyone laugh. He remembers getting a tape recorder when he was 12 and spending hours talking into it, saying funny things.

But he never thought of performing as a career until he was in college studying to be an accountant. He took a speech course and found that his weekly five-minute speeches made classmates laugh.

"I lived for those five-minute speeches," Regan said.

Soon after college he worked full-time on his comedy, and by the early 1990s, he was landing jobs on the Comedy Central cable network. As for his frequent appearances on Letterman's show, Regan said he sort of feels like a fireman, being called often to be an emergency guest replacement on short notice.

"It's kind of an honor that they trust me to fill in so often," he said.

As for goals, Regan likes what he's doing. Like a lot of stand-ups, he used to think a lot about having his own sitcom on TV. But to get that, he might have to give up one of the things he loves about being a stand-up: working solo.

"I don't want to be an actor in a sitcom, I want to do something based around my comedy," Regan said. "On a sitcom, it's a collaboration. As a stand-up, it's 100 percent autonomy."

Staff Writer Ray Routhier can be contacted at 791-6454 or at:

rrouthier@pressherald.com