Creator / Brian Regan

"I don't know, I don't know really."

"Well, I'm Brian, B-R-I-V-O-L-B-N-the number seven and the letter Q!"

— Brivolbn7q Regan

Brian Joseph Regan (born June, 2, 1958) is an American stand-up comedian. He's known for his consistently clean comedy style; he generally stays away from off-color humor and profanity. He bases all of his humor on common everyday occurrences such as ironing boards and buying juice. So what's so funny about this, you ask? See for yourself! He does a lot of material about his childhood and his own (often unfortunate) experiences at typically normal places such as the emergency room and the airport.

His stand-up specials have included Stupid in School, You Too And Stuff, Comedy Central Presents: Brian Regan, I Walked On The Moon, Standing Up, The Epitome of Hyperbole, All By Myself, and Nunchucks and Flamethrowers.. He's also performed on Late Night With David Letterman and Late Night With Conan O'Brien, and also made an appearance on Game Grumps as a guest.

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Brian Regan's comedy provides examples of:

• Absurdly Long Wait: In one joke he talked about him calling the phone company so he could get his service installed and happy to hear that now they can simply flip a switch to do it.
  Brian: Can you flip it right now?
  Operator: We are gonna flip it Thursday, late, or Friday, or sometime in November.
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable:
  • He once described being told that he pronounced every word of his routine incorrectly as the epi-TOME of hyper-BOWL.
  • He also uses this trope, with a dash of As Long as It Sounds Foreign, to steer his way through a conversation he accidentally joined about art. ("What's your favorite Cézanne?" "Win-TER.")
• All Crimes Are Equal: Subverted with his bit about MANSLAUGHTER!
• Always Someone Better: The "I Walked on the Moon" bit is a riff on people who constantly try to 'top' your story with something better. Brian envies the handful of astronauts who walked on the moon, because their stories would always win.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Brian is the youngest of eight children and jokes frequently about being the burden of his siblings, especially when he was a kid.
• Anti-Humor: He uses an example of a joke his young son tried to tell him — "How come dinosaurs don't talk? 'Cause they're all dead."
• Bait-and-Switch: In Stupid In School, after Brian as a kid has already answered incorrectly in class that the plural of "box" is "boxen".
  Teacher: What is the plural of goose?
  Smart student: Geese.
  Teacher: What is the plural of moose?
  Brian: Moosen!
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: When a doctor tells Brian he's "way too sedentary," he resolves in that very moment to get a dictionary.
• The Beautiful Elite: Part of his stand up on airports compares first class passengers to noblemen. With comfy chairs, better food, sitting in an entirely different section, and their own bathrooms.
  First Class Passenger: Bring me the head of a pig and a goblet of something cool and refreshing. Anyone have a fiddle? Have someone from coach fiddle for me. Amuse me.
• Big Eater: When it comes to ice cream and Fig Newtons at least.
  "I eat Fig Newtons by the sleeve!"
• Book Dumb: He has several comedic personas who are not only dim but actively resistant to learning.
• Captain Obvious: Discussed when he talked about telling his doctor that he suffered from heartburn, and his doctor's only response was to give him a pamphlet on the common causes of heartburn, all of which Brian already knew. He then wondered if that was a common response to an injury or an ailment, such as if someone came in with a cannonball wound:
  Brian: (pretending to read from a pamphlet) Number one: Do not stand directly in front of a cannon. How true that is!
• Cold Reading: One of his gags is a riff on Phony Psychics.
• Crippling Overspecialization: An extended gag on how some lawyers specialize in "trip and fall" injuries while others specialize in "slip, trip and fall". He has another riff on "ear, nose, and throat" doctors and wonders why humans have so many specialists but all animals go to the same vet.
  Where are the big horned sheep knee doctors? The wildebeest gastroenterologists? The giraffe "throat, throat, and throat" doctors?
• Digging Yourself Deeper: A major source of Brian's comedy is the self-confessed Fatal Flaw that he just can't learn when to keep his mouth shut. He once went up to a group of art enthusiasts at a museum and said "I love art," knowing nothing at all about the subject.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In "All By Myself", he said he's against the death penalty with the exception for people who thought of making hand soap dispensers squirt soap outwards instead of down on your hands. "Feel free to kill those people!" In the same act, he wants the police to have a large helicopter with a magnetic crane to pick up any broken down cars on the highway and drop them off the road into a ditch to avoid traffic jams.
• Distracted by the Shiny: When commenting on how car dealerships tie balloons onto cars, this is how he imagines the thought process of a person influenced by such a tactic must go like.
  Well, that's it for my day, I am heading hom-wwWHOOOOOA!!! Are those BALLOONS?! I don't know what they're tied to but I'm buying one!
• The Ditz: Typically how he depicts himself, particularly his younger self.
• Foregone Conclusion: Airline passengers who sit at the very back know that the only food left once the flight attendant arrives is the most undesirable. The flight attendant is also aware of this and attempts to enhance the remaining choice by pretending the previous choices never existed.
  Flight Attendant: We have a turkey sandwich, a chicken quesadilla, and a cold fish head.
  Brian: Ahh.. wonder what I'm gonna get.
• Fridge Logic: He brings up an example in-universe^note well, as in-universe as you can get with jokes with log trucks. "Sometimes you're driving on the highway, and you see two trucks loaded up with logs, and they pass each other. Now if they need logs over there... and they need 'em over there... you'd think a phone call would save a lot of problems!"
• From the Mouths of Babes: He recalls watching sports with his 3-year old daughter when out of nowhere, she says "Put on something appropriate for me".
• Fun with Acronyms: A person texts Brian "LMAO." Brian's Response: "LMNOP."
• Golden Mean Fallacy: Brian makes fun of this when discussing a city council meeting.
  Council member: Right now the law is buildings are not allowed to be any higher than thirty feet; my client wants a building that's seven hundred feet. So clearly we need to compromise...
  Brian: Right now the law is, I'm not allowed to rob any liquor stores... but I wanna rob a hundred liquor stores! So clearly we need to compromise!
• The Heckler: A benign version. Two of his specials have had audience members yell out Call Backs to his old stuff to his amusement or confusion.
• Hollywood Spelling: He assumed the name of a girl he met was "Amy", it was actually "Aymie". This tires Brian out.
• Humble Hero: He talked about the incident of Captain Sullenberger landing a plane safely in Hudson River and that he doesn't consider himself a hero. Brian wonders if it's a requirement for heroes to be humble and says that in this instance it would probably be okay if the captain just admitted he was a hero:
  Reporter: Do you think you are a hero?
  Captain Sully: ...Uh, yes. Do you see the footage of that plane coming in? Have any idea how hard that was? Keeping the wings level and the nose up? Survivable speed? HERO!
• I'm Standing Right Here: Brian's reaction over seeing his wife and ear doctor laughing at his botched hearing test.
• Insistent Terminology: Doctors never say "pain", they say "pressure."
  Doctor: In a moment you're going to feel a little pressure.
  Patient: OOOW! The pressure hurt like hell!
• It's All About Me: Brian's assumption about people who talk about their stories at parties.
  Brian: Beware of the ME Monster.
• Just Here for the Free Snacks: Recalls that he played Little League as a kid just because the players got Sno-Cones after the game.
• Left It In: During the "Horses" bit on All By Myself, Brian keeps cracking up during the joke, interrupting himself (mainly due to the ridiculousness of his lazy horse impression). Eventually he says "This joke's not going to make it on the CD, I can tell."
• The Load: On his guest appearance on Game Grumps, playing video games with hosts Arin and Dan, as well as Brian's son Chris. While playing Mario Kart 8, Brian is easily the worst of the four players, though Brian frequently jokes about how bad he is. He even gets a small amount of satisfaction when he comes in 11th place in one race (out of 12 racers).
• Loud of War: Brian trying to out-moan his unseen roommate so the hospital staff will see him first. It eventually spreads to the entire floor.
  Random Patient: Quit moaning, we're all hurting!
• Massive Numbered Siblings: Several of his routines deal with his childhood growing up with seven siblings.
• Misery Poker:
  • Invoked during his bit about having to go to the emergency room for a particularly bad stomach virus. The nurse asked him to rate his pain on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the worst), and Brian was concerned about rating it a 10 because he'd heard that the worst pain one could endure was a broken femur, and he was afraid a mob of patients from the "Broken Femur Ward" would storm his room:
  Broken Femur Patient: Who the HELL had the AUDACITY to say he was at a LEVEL TEN?! You know nothing about ten— get me a sledgehammer, let me show you what ten is all about, Mister Tummyache!
  • He subsequently decides against saying 9 because he was afraid of having to contend with a similar reaction from those who have experienced childbirth. Then he contemplates the misery of any poor woman who experienced childbirth with a broken femur...
• Mondegreen Gag: From All By Myself:
  Audience Member: MANSLAUGHTER!
  Brian: (honest) Vampire?
• Motor Mouth: His impression of a monster truck driver talks this way. Brian, however, can't follow along with any of it because of how specific the driver gets about his engine.
• Mundane Made Awesome: People who are descriptively selling you refrigerators despite all of them keeping your food cold. Special mention is the "Egg Area" which is an area for eggs, and it's all written in cursive ("a really nice feature").
• My Nayme Is: His bit about "Amy-spelled-Aymie" provides the page quote.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: "My wife and I have two wonderful kids...and another kid."
• Never Say "Die": His bit about doctors. They'll never tell you that someone is about to hurt...but they will tell you all about "pressure".
• No Listening Skills: According to Brian, humanity's greatest doom is not caring to listen. During a graduation ceremony, a faculty member advised the audience not to cheer but just clap for their students since the school wanted all its graduates to not feel discouraged. Cue the first student in the list.
• Not Helping Your Case: The bit about a guy who's against the concept of reading. Just his opening argument is so bad, his opponent yields all of his time.
• One Thing Led to Another:
  I hate when you're trying to read something and you come across the expression "One thing led to another". What in the hell kind of lazy writing is that? Isn't that your job as the writer to tell me how this led to that? You can just throw that in there? "Adolf Hitler was rejected as a young man on his application to art school. One thing led to another...and the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the sovereign nation of Japan." This is some pamphlet!
• Plausible Deniability: He questions this regarding drug use in sports. Specifically, he questions when a player says he never KNOWINGLY took steroids.
  Professional Player: Good night. OUCH. Why did you stick that needle in my butt? OUCH. Why you do that occasionally through my career? OUCH. Why don't you answer my persistent queries?
• Pluto Is Expendable: One of his routines deals with Pluto being declared a dwarf planet, anthropomorphizing Pluto and treating the change in status like a career demotion.
  "Can I still go around the sun?"
  "Feel free!"
  (Inelegant Blubbering while walking in a circle.)
• Pronouncing My Name for You:
  "Hey there, Caro...lynn."
  "It's Caroline, Brian."
  "It's Bri-yown."
• Sarcasm Mode: He sometimes goes here. In a bit about elementary school science projects, he mentions a student who always did a model of the solar system every year.
  "The big yellow one is the SUN!"
  "Well, you're breaking new ground there, Copernicus."
• Schedule Fanatic: He recommends those who microwave their Pop-Tarts (for three seconds) to loosen up their schedule.
• Seemingly Profound Fool: During his Science Fair project, which he did at the last moment, he just filled a cup with dirt. His teacher thought that it was a experiment to show how not to grow something. He went along with it.
• Self-Deprecation: A lot of his routine is based on making fun of himself.
  • He has several bits about how stupid he was in school.
    "Brian, what is the plural for 'box'"?
    "Boxen. I bought two boxen of donuts."
  • Brian admits that his biggest flaw is his inability to just shut up. He has several routines where he gets himself into all kinds of awkward, weird, and unpleasant situations because he said something he shouldn't have.
• Serious Business: His bit on eye exams. He worries that, if he messes up even slightly, he'll end up with glasses that look like something out of a sci-fi movie.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Try sending Brian a text message...
• Significant Name Overlap: In one sketch, he talks about a man called Brian Regan, a United States spy/traitor. He explains that he heard about him on the news, but wasn't really paying attention.
  News Anchor: It's unclear whether the charges against Brian Regan will lead to his execution.
  Brian: ...Honey, did we pay that parking ticket?
• Simpleton Voice: Frequently, usually when playing his younger self or any generic stupid person.
• Spelling Bee: The first half of his "Stupid in School" skit centers around one of these.
• Spell My Name With An S: On hearing a woman's name as "Amy."
  Brian: Oh, A-M-Y?
  Aymie: No, A-Y-M-I-E.
  Brian: Ughhh... I have to take a nap.
• Take Your Time: The large oversight of the lack of valet parking at an emergency hospital when the driver or the passenger is injured.
• Technologically Blind Elders: Receiving his first text message (from a wrong number) thoroughly confuses him.
• Title Drop: His specials' names relate to a joke he does on set.
• The Unintelligible: He explains the annoyance of not giving the journalists a microphone to ask questions at a press conferences after a sports match or a crime scene.
  Journalist: [overly long mumble]
  Coach: Uh, that was a coaching decision.
• Unit Confusion: His bit about trying to call UPS to ship some boxes and getting stymied when they ask for the dimensions. Not only does he not have anything to measure the boxes with, he doesn't know what "girth" means.
  Brian: And the girth is... three.
  UPS rep: Three what?
  Brian: Three... girth units.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: In-Universe. His bit on kids party games, specifically Pin the Tail where a blindfolded kid holds a sharp pin and Musical Chairs unknowingly giving kids anxiety.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • One of his gags is an extended riff on a trailer marked "Caution: Transporting Show Horses."
  Oooooh. Oh, ten-and-two. We're sharing the road with show horses. If I start to lose control, I'll hit one of these cars with people.
  • Naturally, a second trailer is marked "Don't Worry: Just Dumb ol' Donkeys."
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Brian has a routine about how you never see point-counterpoint arguments for reading, since no one can argue against it without looking like such an idiot that the pro side wouldn't even have to speak.
  Con side: "Hey, let me tell you somthin': reading don't never doed nothin', 'cause if you had.. If you has... Have had... Have haseded... If you did haveded... Hasededeved... A book, and you looks.. had looks... have looks... has looks... Have lookeded, lookedeveded, have lookededed at it... Then you might not even know why you had doed that."
  Pro side: "I have nothing to add."

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