Ask comedy heavy-hitters Marc Maron, Bill Burr, Patton Oswalt, Jimmy Fallon and Jerry Seinfeld (the list goes on) who tops their list of favorite stand-ups? Brian Regan.
“No comedian in the world says, ‘Yeah, I want to follow Brian Regan,’” Chris Rock quipped on Maron’s WTF podcast.
But before Regan became the favorite stand-up of the world’s most popular comedians, he was slinging toys, cleaning carpets and whipping up salads. Regan even had a promising college football career playing wide receiver for Heidelberg College in Ohio, where he was studying to become an accountant. It was the head coach at Heidelberg who approached Regan and encouraged him to switch gears and pursue a degree in the communication and theater arts department. “You’re a funny guy,” he told Regan at the time. “You make everyone on the football team laugh.”
By the early ’80s, he was ready to trade in the football-induced busted knee and broken collar bone for a microphone, and he’s remained a fixture in the stand-up comedy scene ever since. With more than four decades in the biz, Regan’s noticed the ways in which comedy has evolved through the years — just as any other art form, he notes — but it hasn’t fazed him.
“I don’t adapt, I just do it the way I like to do it,” the comedian says over the phone from his hotel. “I think it’s a mistake to try to figure out what other people are doing, or what audiences are looking for. I’m just going to do what I think is funny, and if there are enough people out there who agree with me, then I’ll be fortunate enough to have a career.”
Regan’s career path takes him to Costa Mesa this weekend when he brings his national tour to The Segerstrom Center for the Arts on Saturday, Sept. 21.
While many comedians, including Rock, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappell, have bemoaned cancel culture’s ripple effect on comedy and creative license (even Hollywood darling Goldie Hawn called hypersensitivity a quandary for comedians) Regan isn’t batting an eye.
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“The stuff I think about doesn’t really bump up too hard against anything that’s super controversial,” Regan says. “I’ve never really had to adjust accordingly.” Sure, there are jokes he might avoid in “today’s world,” he continues, but overall, he’s not sweatin’ it. Regan does poke fun at people in his bits, but it’s often himself, and when it’s not, it might be a pretentious partygoer who pronounces Genghis Khan “Jen-gus,” or an egregious family of line jumpers at Disneyland.
His brand of comedy is highly relatable and observational. On Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” he notes how awkward it can be when you have to tell your guests that they need to “jiggle the handle” and how high up something so universal might go, “Excuse me, Queen Elizabeth, you’re going to need to jiggle the handle.”
But because Regan’s comedy isn’t colored with four-letter words and sex, many have pigeonholed him as strictly clean. “From my side, we never push out that I’m a clean comedian,” he says. “I feel like it has the wrong connotation. I think if somebody were to hear that word before they see what I do, they would put a connotation on it that has nothing to do with my comedy. It happens to be clean, but that’s not the point of it.
“When people hear clean comedy, they leapfrog over to thinking, ‘Oh, he’s trying to make a point here.’ And it’s like, no, I just enjoy doing it this way. That would be like a photographer who likes to make black-and-white photography saying, ‘I think this is better than color photographs.’ And it’s like, well, no, it’s different from color photographs, but it’s not better,” he continues. “So I try to make sure that that’s my point of view too. It’s not better than another kind of comedy. It’s just different.”
On the flip side, Regan portrayed the sometimes recovering, sometimes booze-addled Mugsy for three seasons on “Loudermilk,” his first recurring acting role. Aside from the occasional comedic relief and that signature Regan physicality (his eyebrow work is unparalleled), the role is a departure from the stand-up comedian his audiences know. Mugsy is a self-described “giant f— up,” hellbent on becoming a better father to his kids whose childhoods were tainted by his alcoholism. Will Sasso, who portrays Ben in the series, said Regan’s performance in season three was “reason enough to watch the show,” and director Peter Farrelly said Regan “got to show a side of himself that blew all of us away.”
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“It means a lot to me that Peter Farrelly gave me that role, because it gave me an opportunity to be creative in a different way,” Regan says just as he pauses to answer a knock at his hotel door. A woman’s voice can be heard in the background asking if the minibar needs restocking, and he politely declines. Regan is no real-life Mugsy.
“When I do stand-up comedy, I’m doing my own thoughts and my own words, and I’m bringing them to life, but in ‘Loudermilk,’ as Mugsy, somebody else wrote those words,” he continues. “So it’s interesting to look at words that somebody else wrote and go, ‘OK, I need to make this feel real to me.’ And it’s very interesting creatively to do.”
The show premiered on the AT&T Audience Network in 2017, and ran for three seasons. But it wasn’t until it hit Netflix earlier this year that the series really took off. “Loudermilk Season 1” was in Netflix’s Top 10 most-viewed shows in the U.S. for four weeks, and fans are still crossing their fingers that the series will pick back up for a fourth season. Regan says another season is still up in the air. “Hollywood is making a lot less shows, nothing to do with ‘Loudermilk,’ but the movie industry is in trouble, if you will. Television is in trouble.”
Whether he gets to play Mugsy again or not, Regan’s game to act. “I would hope some big-time director would happen upon ‘Loudermilk’ and go, ‘Hey, this guy’s pretty good! Maybe I should put him in one of my movies.”
Brian Regan
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 21
Where: Segerstrom Hall, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
Tickets: $66.67-$77.97
Information: 714-556-2787; scfta.org