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