Brian Regan isn’t looking to downsize

Since last performing in Lexington in 2012, a few things have happened to Brian Regan. Sure, he’s probably performed hundreds of times in theaters across the country as one of the most active, respected and popular stand-up comics working today. But in 2015, Regan experienced a notable last and a memorable first.

Regan took the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theatre one last time as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman. A personal favorite of Letterman’s, The Late Show became Regan’s self-described “TV home,” leading to more than 25 guest appearances over two decades and a huge career boost. In fact, Regan was happy to have killed his five-minute set five months before Letterman’s retirement and thought that was a good note to end on.

“Then, I was informed they reached out, that they wanted me to be on one of their final shows,” Regan recalls. “It was incredibly flattering, to say the least. It was a tremendous experience.”

Four months after his last Late Show set, he went on to do something no stand-up comedian had ever done before. In September 2015, Regan took the stage to perform an hour-long set for his latest Comedy Central special. What made Brian Regan: Live From Radio City Music Hall so unique is it was the first ever Comedy Central special to be network’s history to be broadcast live.

Regan, who produced two prior specials with the network, pitched the idea to Comedy Central as a way to create a bit of a challenge and a lot of buzz. He knew the nature of this performance was a different animal.

“I concentrate intensely when I do a five-minute set for a Letterman or a Jimmy Fallon. To do that for an hour, it’s amazingly intense,” he says. “Even though in one way, it’s not a big deal, because every time you do a show, it’s live ...it’s obviously a bigger audience and if something did go awry, you’d have to live with that for a long time, if not forever.”

Minus a few moments where he got tripped up on a word or leaving out a small portion of his final joke, the live special went off with little incident while further cementing Regan’s reputation in the stand-up comedy world. But Regan doesn’t want to be known or remembered for a single stand-up special or a final late-night performance.

Over the course of his career, Regan’s comedy has always had certain signature elements. The fact that he chooses to work “clean” and shun profanity or crude topics. The over-exaggerated physicality and delivery that gives his jokes a distinct, goofy personality. The way he explores everyday experiences and encounters from a different dimension to extract laughter.

“Sometimes, my topic choices on purpose are incredibly mundane, but I try to find incredibly weird stuff within that,” he says.

Regan has built a devoted following while continuing to gain new fans, and part of that has to do with the type of comedy he creates and the volume in which he creates it. He admits his comedy is for the crowd and his peers.

“I want the comedy itself to be respected. I like to throw a wide net. I want audiences to like it, but I also want comedians to like it,” he says. “I’m a creative pig. I want everybody to like me.”

Some comics choose to take a break from touring and hit the clubs to try out new material on smaller crowds. Regan doesn’t have that luxury ... and he doesn’t want it. He would rather just keep touring and try out untested jokes for an audiences of thousands.

“I’m always out there and the comedy just ever-evolves. Old stuff goes out. New stuff goes in,” he says. “I like for it to just change from night to night to night. Saturday isn’t going to be 100 percent different from Friday, but it’s going to be two percent different and over the course of a year, it’s going to be drastically different.”

Regan will once again perform at the Singletary Center for the Arts in Lexington on Thursday. He says he will do plenty of newer stuff while also including some older bits he did for his previous stand-up specials that never made it on the final recordings. He says he has no plans to slow down, preferring to constantly create and perform simultaneously instead of riding a precisely-tuned hour’s worth of material from city to city. Regardless of what stage of development any of his material might be in on any given night, it’s the rewarding result of what he does that matters most.

“One human being making another human being laugh or a room full of people laugh is a strange phenomenon,” he says. “There has to be a strange psychological connection between human beings and it’s a beautiful thing when it works.”

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 12:05 PM with the headline "Brian Regan isn’t looking to downsize."