Catching up with comedian Brian Regan

"This tells you how exciting my career is," deadpans comedian Brian Regan. "I'm calling you from my basement."

Well, it's actually his office, which is in the basement of his house in Las Vegas. But he's not deterred by his location. "I do come up from my basement occasionally."

In fact, Regan is in the midst of doing a Comedy Central tour around the country. The cable channel has been good for his career, having featured him in a special, "Brian Regan: Standing Up." Another special is in the works.

The Miami native grew up with seven siblings. When he was a child, he used to record interviews with himself and play them back for the family. "I don't know if they thought I was funny or they were laughing because they thought I was twisted," he says. "Either way, it was all good."

These days, his material is a bit more sophisticated. "I don't understand when baseball players say they didn't knowingly take steroids," he says.

Then he acts out how such a scenario would play out: "Ouch! Why did you stick that needle in my (backside)? Ouch! How come you do that occasionally throughout my career? Ouch! Why won't you answer my persistent queries?"

Regan discovered his comedy calling in college, where he originally went to study accounting. He decided comedy was where he should be while taking a speech class.

"I lived for my weekly five-minute speeches," he says. Those speeches to the class were his earliest comedy routines.

His classmates didn't always understand he was doing shtick. "I'd say something like, 'Well, I was at the bus stop today ...,' and one of the guys (in class) would say, 'Uh, no, you weren't. You had breakfast with us.' It kind of blew the whole (routine)," he says.

During one of his first performances in a legitimate venue, Regan blanked onstage. "I started doing (a bit) on how dumb I was for forgetting my routine," he says. "I was ad-libbing."

The set killed, and he got props from it. "The next time I remembered my set, and I bombed," Regan says.

During his 20-plus years in comedy, Regan has developed a philosophy about how the job works. "Comedy is the only art form that, when somebody doesn't like you, they don't put it on their own shoulders," he says.

"If someone goes to the opera and they don't like it, they don't say, 'Well, that opera singer is horrible.' They just say, 'Hey, the opera is not for me.'

"In comedy, if they don't laugh, it's always, 'That guy ain't funny.' People never want to disown their own sense of humor."

(E-mail Terry Morrow of The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee at morrow2(at)knews.com.)