Brian Regan wants you to know that weird thoughts surface in a stand-up comedian's mind during a performance, "things the audience does not see."

Regan, who plays this Saturday at the Silver Legacy, recalls the time he finally fulfilled a dream but struggled to keep his lips moving.

"I was finally on 'The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.' Back then, getting on Carson was the one big step in a stand-up's life. Now, the audience is so fractioned off with a lot of talk shows, a lot of hosts, a lot more channels. Carson was 'it' for a long time.

"So, I got out in front of the audience and my mouth dried up. There was no water handy, unlike being on stage where a bottle of water is always in my reach. I am doing my routine and getting very worried about having to lick my lips. I kept telling myself, 'I can't lick my lips. It will look terrible, and there goes my career.' I have this big back-and-forth going on in my head while I'm telling my jokes, which have nothing to do with it.

"I wound up licking my gums. I thought, 'OK, that looked horrible. I just ruined my performance.'

"I watch the show the night it airs. 'Here it comes. Here comes the nightmare.' It is so trivial. You would have to be watching for it to notice it."

Regan is now a veteran of the talk shows. He regularly does "The Late Show With David Letterman" and will appear again this month.

"I am always thrilled to do that. It puts a fire under you to perform a tight five minutes."

Inspired by the comedians of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Steve Martin and the Smothers Brothers, Regan has become one of the best-known of contemporary stand-ups. Ironically, he's not known at all by a large demographic who prefer their comedy more cutting edge, more confrontational, and certainly more "adult," which in the world of comedy means dirty.

Regan is, for instance, extremely popular in Utah. In fact, he may be the most popular comedian in the state. In March 2010, he broke the record for the most consecutive shows by a comedian at Salt Lake City's Abravanel Hall – five sold-out performances.

"It's not by my design, particularly," he said. "There's a big community out there who respond to me, and not just in Utah, because I work clean. I don't tell dirty jokes. I used to use adult language in part of my act, but when I broke it down, I realized that material amounted to only about 5 percent. So it served no purpose and I decided to go 100 percent. But it wasn't a business decision.

"Working clean just makes me feel good."

He has said in the past that if a joke works well without a dirty word, there is no reason to use the word. That was when he first started going against the grain, in the early 1990s when every comedy club had a practically blue atmosphere. It was then he made his first Reno appearance, performing at Catch A Rising Star when it was part of what was then Bally's (now the Grand Sierra).

"I remember the first time I was ever performing in a comedy club," he said. "I told myself, 'Well, Brian, this is it. This is the real McCoy. Can I do this or can't I?'

"And my brain shut off. It completely blanked out. I could not do any of my jokes because I did not remember them. I had forgotten my entire routine. I desperately tried to ad-lib, and it kept getting worse. All I could think of was how stupid I was for not being able to remember my five-minute act.

"It turns out I had just done five minutes of self-deprecation. The regular comedians in the club came up to me and told me what a great routine I had, and what a great idea to build a routine about forgetting my routine."

The act no longer springs from desperation. And the rooms have gotten larger. This Saturday will mark his fourth appearance at the Silver Legacy. In fact, Regan now regularly plays in venues so large that giant screens are a necessity for his face to be seen by those in the back.

However, he finds it funny that even people in the front seats, within reach of him, will be spotted looking up or to the side to watch him on the screen. It is, he says, the addictive power of television, and of course it doesn't bother him at all. That is the medium that has made him.

And he will continue his relationship with it. He's had several Comedy Central specials, most notably "Brian Regan Standing Up" and "The Epitome of Hyperbole." He's going to "soon lay down another hour," and he's thinking of putting his comedy into an animated format. His kids' loves have become some of his own, including "SpongeBob SquarePants."

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