Brian Regan Live: 'I Laugh at My Own Discomfort'

‘100 Funniest Comedy Albums’ Book Excerpt

Frank Mastropolo

Uproar

Brian Regan’s debut album was 1997’s Brian Regan: Live. The album features the comedian’s witty, self-deprecating style. “I don’t like other people’s discomfort, you know?” Regan told the Boseman Daily Chronicle.

“I laugh at my own discomfort and make fun of that on stage, but I’m not the kind of person who likes to poke my finger at other people’s deficiencies.

“It’s me and a doctor, or it’s me and a flight attendant, or it’s me and a refrigerator salesman, or it’s me and an inanimate object. It’s me and a microwave oven or it’s me and a refrigerator. And I act them out.”

Regan works without profanity or shock value. “This has been a long struggle for me,” Regan explained on the Dead-Frog website.

“I never really describe my own comedy as clean. It’s what other people do. But I always worry that it oversimplifies it to say that it’s clean. To me, an empty stage for an hour is clean. Nobody’s going to see that.

“I just work the way that I like to work. It has nothing to do with me sitting down and saying, ‘OK, I’m going to write clean comedy.’ I just write the kind of comedy that I like to do. It just happens to be clean.

“But at the risk of sounding like I’m patting myself on the back, I do think it’s interesting. I like what I do as a comic, and hopefully, other people like it as well.

“But I always felt that there’s a lot of people out there who, hopefully, like me who don’t think one way or the other if it’s clean. They just think, ‘He’s a pretty funny guy.’ I’d like to think people aren’t coming to see me going, ‘Man, we’re going to see some clean comedy.’

“I thought I had said that on the CD, and my brother Dennis, who is also a comedian, said, ‘Why don’t you call it Somebody Throw a Tarp Over Me?’ So I thought, ‘That’s kind of funny.’ I was thinking about using that as the title, and then I listened to the bit, and I hadn’t said it in the CD. Can you imagine?”

Sometimes, you’ll say the right thing but at the wrong time and feel stupid. Somethin’ like, “You too!”

I was gettin’ out of a cab at the airport, and the driver goes, “Hey, have a nice flight!” “You too!”

You too, you have a nice flight too, in case you ever fly someday. Don’t even look at me, I’m a moron. Don’t know when to say the “You too!” phrase. Can’t handle it.

Have you ever guessed somebody’s gender wrong? ‘Cause no recoverin’ from that! You just gotta move on ‘cause you ain’t wrigglin’ outta nothin’, ya know?

“Hey, uh, excuse me, Sir?”“Ma’am!”“OK! OK, bye! Bye, Human! Bye, Person! Nice to meet you, Individual!”

I can’t remember names. And I’m always tryin’ to do the nickname thing to get out of it. Everybody knows what you’re tryin’ to pull, you know?

“Hey . . . Buckaroo?”“My name’s not Buckaroo.”“Sure, sure it is . . . Pardner?”

Chris Rock said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, “No comedian in the world says, ‘Yeah, I want to follow Brian Regan.’”

Frank Mastropolo is the author of 100 Funniest Comedy Albums, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.