Clean Operator

Brian Regan says the mullet, and Hollywood, held him back.

Comedy fandom tends to breed pretension. Brian Regan might be the exception to that rule. He's a big, physical comedian who practices the kind of observational comedy that was all the rage in the early '90s but has been replaced by jokes that are experiential and often deeply personal. And he doesn't swear. Basically he's the opposite of Louis C.K.

Between performing the first live broadcast of a comedy special in Comedy Central history and headlining the Keller Auditorium, Regan talked to Willamette Week about getting started in comedy, working clean and his beef with network television.

GO: Brian Regan is at the Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St. 8 pm Friday, Feb. 12. $71.

Willamette Week: Is your Portland show part of a new tour?

Brian Regan: Well yes and no. I'm always touring, but I'm not literally on the road as we speak. My tour started in 1980-something. It never ends.

So is your new show different from your most recent Comedy Central special?

I'm trying to move away from that material. Once I do an hour like that, I try to replace it as quickly as possible. So I'm in that process. It's hard to turn it over on a dime, where it's a brand spanking new hour, but I would say that eighty percent of what I do now is not on that special.

What's your process of developing new material like?

You just got to squeeze it in there. The coming up with new stuff, that's the thrill for me. As nice as it is to hear, "hey man, that joke was funny," I also like to hear, "hey man, that joke was new." I consider that a compliment, and then I realize that they never said it was funny, but I'll take the new part.

What was it like being a stand-up during the historic comedy boom of the 1980s?

I was very fortunate in that when I decided I wanted to be a comedian it was before the comedy boom. The only comedy clubs that I knew about were in New York City and Los Angeles. Then a comedy club opened in Fort Lauderdale, which is only an hour away from where I grew up. I remember seeing an ad in the Miami Herald that said "The Comic Strip comedy club in Fort Lauderdale, open mic night Monday nights." It was an ad that changed my life. I knew I was going to pursue stand-up, but now I could do it with a tank of gas instead of having to possibly move to another city. I worked at club exclusively. They gave me a job, not as a comedian but working in the kitchen and seating people and stuff like that. They let me go on every night. After I was there for two or three years, comedy started exploding around the country, so when I was ready to go out on the road, there were places I could go. It couldn't have been a more perfect storm.

At what point did you make the transition from comedy clubs to theaters?

That took a while. I've been doing theaters now for about ten years, so I did comedy clubs for many years. At first when you go out on the road you're playing bars that have comedy night and comedy clubs. I'd perform anywhere that would give me sixty dollars. I better not put that amount out there, then people will go "oh I didn't realize we could pay him only sixty dollars." I'm at the hundred dollar level now. If you want me, you better have a hundred dollars in cash. When you first start, you perform wherever you can get on stage and make a few dollars. You just gradually work your way up. It got to where I felt like I was putting enough people in these seats where maybe it was better to just go to a city for one night than it was to go to a city for four nights, and that's when we made the move.

Have you ever thought about doing a run of club shows?

I did that a few years ago to re-experience it, if you will. It was fun on one level, but you get to a point where it's hard to go back. I felt like when you go to a grade school and you see how tiny those desks are and you go "man, I used to sit in those." It's sort of like that when you go to a comedy club and go "man, I used to live in here." I used to live in this world, and I like being able to take advantage of what I've earned. The thing I do miss about the comedy clubs is the camaraderie of hanging around with other comedians. It's fun to hang with people who do what you do.

Is there any venue you haven't played yet that you would like to play?

I would love to play at the South Pole, if I could get enough people together to go down there and build a stage. I want it to be worth my while. I'd want at least a thousand people. I'm just throwing that out there, if somebody wants to put together a South Pole show, I'm open to it. That would actually be a wonderful special, the South Pole Comedy Special.

Do some people come to your comedy because it's clean, and then discover you're not what they expected?

The clean label is weird for me. It's like a double-edged sword. I never describe myself as a clean comedian, that's what other people like to do. If people don't know what I do, and they just see the clean word, I think they conjure up the wrong image of what I'm all about. I'm not going around the country doing a kiddie show. I'm not on stage twisting balloon animals for kids. Lately, especially since I did my last special, I'm playing around with stuff that is a departure for me. I have a couple of jokes about gun control, and foreign policy, and politics. Clean is so important to other people, much more than it is to me.

Do you have networks, or places like Netflix, approaching you to work on anything?

Not really. If you could make an analogy of Hollywood of being a big giant eye, I'm right in the blind spot. I'm right in that little area that they can't see. I don't know why, I've scratched my head for years, but I've never been the flavor of the month. In fact I've gone into network meetings where you can tell the moment you walk in that they didn't know who you were fifteen minutes before the meeting. I've seen my disc like in the pop-out thing in a network meeting. You know they just watched my special ten minutes before just so they could get themselves familiar.

Do you ever think about bringing back that mullet from your first Showtime special?

It's weird, back when I had that hair style it wasn't called that. At the time I would have to go "I want it short on the sides around the ears, and I want it long in the back and long on the top." Man if I could get in a time machine and go back and walk into a Supercuts and go "mullet, give me a mullet," I would have saved a lot of time. I would probably be a lot more successful. I would have had a lot more time to write jokes but I had to describe my hairstyle. That's what held me back.

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