COMEDY : A Dufus Gets His Act Together at the Improv

Brian Regan’s stand-up routines deal with everything from growing up in a family with eight children to redneck “monster truck” drivers and self-satisfied American farmers who are paid not to grown corn (“You know, we usually not grow tomatoes, but there’s more money in not growing corn.”)

But Regan, who’s headlining at the Irvine Improv through Sunday, is especially adept at dealing with human behavior.

“Do you ever say a phrase that you say all the time at the wrong time?” he asks in his act. “You feel like a complete idiot. You know, something like ‘You too!’ I was getting out of the cab at the airport and the driver goes, ‘Have a nice flight.’ ”

“You too!” Regan responded, waving to the driver. Then, attempting to cover up: “You too. . . . You have a nice flight too. . . . In case you ever fly some day. . . . “

But he never learns, Regan said. “Like a waitress will bring my meal: ‘Hey, enjoy your meal!’

“You too!”

For a good-looking, seemingly hip, thirtysomething guy, Regan has this dufus thing down pat. With a theater-trained flair for facial expressions and body language, the highly animated Regan literally transforms himself into a prime example of dufus erectus.

He’s especially good at conjuring up memories of being a childhood dufus--sort of a Beaver Cleaver to the nth degree. He recalled, for example, how it feels to be put out in right field in Little League because you “stink” as a player and just how anxiety-provoking playing musical chairs can be for a 7-year-old.

“I try to touch on a lot of different things, but my favorite subject is behavior,” the New York-based comedian said by phone from San Diego last week. “I think a lot of comedians like to talk about the outside world and I prefer to talk about the ‘inside’ world, the stuff that’s going on inside.

“I think we all feel uncomfortable, paranoid and insecure, and we mask those feelings, but I try to show through my act that we all feel that way, but it’s OK. “

Regan, who grew up in a suburb of Miami, was majoring in communications and theater arts in a small college in Ohio when he dropped out in his senior year a decade ago to pursue a career in stand-up comedy.

With a string of network and cable TV appearances to his credit, he has been on a career roll the past year. He not only made his debut on “The Tonight Show” last April, but it came on the same night that “A Pair of Jokers,” his cable special with his comedian brother, Dennis Regan, premiered on Showtime. Last month, Regan’s first solo comedy special, “Something’s Wrong with the Regan Boy,” aired on Showtime.

As for his physical comedy style, Regan said that when he was studying theater in college he was taught as an actor “to fill your stage.”

“That doesn’t always necessarily mean physically, but the concept is valid,” he said. “I find that a lot of comedians waste all of the space they have available to them by standing behind the microphone and just rattling off jokes.”

As clever as they are, he said, “I feel that they can add to it substantially. So I’ve learned to make use of what’s available to me up there, and I go back and forth a lot like a caged lion and I hunch over and I do stuff with my face. I like to play around because I think that comedy can be a visual medium as well as an audio medium.”

The most appealing part of Regan’s act, however, is that he usually uses himself as the butt of his humor.

Rather than talking about someone else, he believes it is better “to put the punch line on stage behind the microphone.” But what he has found is that the audience is not laughing at him. “They’re laughing at themselves because they’ve experienced the same things.”

With a laugh, he added that “it amazes me how much people get into this. It’s kind of like a learning experience for me: Maybe it wasn’t just ‘me’ my whole life, and the way people are laughing I realize everybody felt like this and I wasn’t the only goofball.”

Even if members of the audience didn’t grow up in as large a family as Regan did, it’s easy to relate to his routines about living with seven siblings:

“When you grow up in a big family, you have to ‘call’ your belongings every day. Like, ‘I call that chair! I get that chair when I get back!’ ‘I call food tonight! I get food!’

“My older brothers always took whatever they wanted anyway. When we were all getting in the car I knew where I was going to end up sitting, so I’d pretend that I wanted that and I’d call, ‘Back seat! In the middle! With my feet on the hump!”

Who: Brian Regan.

When: Thursday, April 16, and Sunday, April 19, at 8:30 p.m.; Friday, April 17, at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, April 18, at 8 and 10:30 p.m. With Janeen Garafolo and Ed Crasnick.

Where: The Improv, 4255 Campus Drive, Irvine.

Whereabouts: In the Irvine Marketplace shopping center, across Campus Drive from the UC Irvine campus.

Wherewithal: $7 to $10.

Where to Call: (714) 854-5455.