Big laughs despite the pandemic? Brian Regan is here to help

The first thing longtime fans will notice about comedian Brian Regan, who performs Friday at the Mahaffey Theater, is that his formerly brown hair is now salt-and-pepper grey. A lot more salt, as long as we’re being honest, than pepper.

This, Regan tells the Catalyst, was a direct result of Covid-19. Though not for the reason you might think.

“I went prematurely grey at I don’t know what age, a long time ago,” he explains. “And when Covid hit I said, ‘The heck with it. I’m not gonna color my hair.’ There was no reason. And then I went back out on the road I thought ‘I’m just gonna leave it the way it is, nice and grey, and see what happens.’”

The Miami-born standup debuted the new ‘do in On the Rocks, the Netflix special he taped last October in Utah. The show – now screening on the streaming service – opens with a 10-minute bit about getting older (Regan is 62) and the gauntlet of doctors he regularly runs. “They say comedy is best if you’re talking about things that are actually going on in your world,” he says. “So that’s kind of where I’m at.”

Self-deprecating and sarcastic, Regan is one of the most popular comics in America; he logged something like 30 appearances with David Letterman, and has appeared on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee twice. He has been on the road for half of his life.

His working routine and his steady paycheck came to a screeching, if temporary, halt in March 2020.

“I thought maybe I would take that time writing a lot of stuff … but I didn’t write anything,” he explains. “I shut the whole comedy factory down! And I basically just chilled out, like most people in the world. I played backgammon, smoked cigars and drank wine and did a whole lot of nothing. And I enjoyed the heck out of it.

“I remember thinking hey, if this is retirement, I can handle it.”

After four months, however, “I started itching to get back out there. As a performer, especially a comedian, you think of funny things and you want to share them with people.”

Mid-summer, he began booking smaller gigs for tiny, CDC-regulation audiences. “Fortunately, audio-wise, you can hear the laughs pretty much the same with or without masks,” Regan says. “And often times when I’m onstage I can’t really see the audience anyway, the lights are so bright.”

He was MIA from the internet. “I didn’t really do any Zoom comedy. I know a lot of friends who went that route. I support anybody that wants to try to do anything, but maybe because I’ve been doing it for so long I just have this feeling that it should be in front of live human beings. So I didn’t want to go that route.

“But I know a lot of comedians who did the little Zoom stuff, where they’re in a little square, and the audience is in squares. But it’s not my cup of tea.”

On the Rocks marked his return to larger venues and more populated halls. “It was originally shot in May of last year, but when Covid hit it got punted to October,” explains the comedian. “And as October got closer and closer, we didn’t know if it was going to get canceled. Because it seemed like half the shows that I had were canceled. It wasn’t until a few days prior to taping where we went ‘OK, I guess this thing is a go.’

“I’m glad that we were able to do it. It was fun to get that comedy routine recorded and over with, you know? I don’t like sitting on comedy for too long. It starts feeling less and less funny, so I looked forward to being able to film that thing.”

Not that Friday’s attendees will hear much, if anything, from On the Rocks. Or any of Brian Regan’s “greatest hits.” No “I Walked on the Moon” or “Kidnapping Russell Crowe.”

Sometimes, he reveals, he might reprise a well-known bit during an encore, if someone calls out for it. Sometimes.

In the regular show, “comedy requires a surprise. One of the aspects of comedy is that there’s a surprise at the end. The punchline is supposed to be a surprise.

“I like doing new stuff. That’s what excites me. And I like to think that my audience is looking forward to hearing some new stuff. They don’t mind a couple of old bits, but for the most part, I want it to be mostly new.”

There’s also not a lot of talk about the pandemic. “People come to a comedy show to forget about their daily strife,” Regan believes.

Regan can also be seen in the Amazon Prime series Loudermilk, created by filmmaker Peter Farrelly and starring Ron (Office Space) Livingston.

Acting is fun and everything, he says, but he’s a standup comic through and through. And this current tour has already got him booked up through the end of the year and beyond. Playing to pandemically-spaced audiences.

“It is weird looking at the people in the front, with the masks on, but you get used to it pretty quickly,” Regan declares. “The people being spread apart is what’s weirder. I’m playing places that are half capacity, or even less. Comedy, I don’t know if it requires people being close together, but it certainly helps.

“So you have all these spikes against you, if you will, when you’re a performer onstage, but you just do the best you can under the circumstances.”

Tickets and details here.