Brian Regan's family-friendly comedy coming to Salt Lake City's Abravanel

Utah loves comedian Brian Regan.

After selling out his initial show, Regan added more shows to accommodate demand. Pretty soon, more shows were added.

So the final Brian Regan show tally in Salt Lake City is five — four nights and one matinee.

One of the reasons why Regan is popular in Utah is his family-friendly delivery. The award-winning comic doesn't believe adding crude material is necessary.

"I was always mostly clean anyway," Regan said during a phone interview from Las Vegas. "I remember when I first went out on the road. I tell you, you can play some pretty rough joints. You can play a bar that had comedy night on Tuesday night, and half the people in the bar didn't know it was comedy night.

"Anyway, there was a time in my act where I had an f-word joke to start and f-word to close and a floating f-word joke I used in the middle to get the audience back.

"Other than that, my act was completely clean. It was more of the stuff I liked to do. Then I started feeling a little queasy about the jokes and asked myself, 'Are they true to me?' 'Are they organic to me?' And I realized they weren't. So I let them fall along the wayside."

Still, Regan said, he respects comics, such as the late Richard Pryor, who have used crude material.

"There are comedians out there who are blue who I think are brilliant," he said. "Richard Pryor is arguably one of the best comedians who ever lived. He certainly had some language in his shows and touched on some subject matter that was touchy, but I though Richard Pryor was a comedic genius."

Regan didn't know he wanted to be a comic until he was in college.

"I liked comedy when I was young," he said. "But I grew up in Miami, Fla. When you grow up so far away from Hollywood and New York, you don't consciously think you could end up in show business.

"I mean, I went to college thinking I would be an accountant."

Still, there was a spark inside him that steered him to comedy, and he decided to audition at a local comedy club in Ft. Lauderdale.

"I had developed a burning desire to become a comedian but had no clue that I would be able to do it," he said. "But I had auditioned at this club four times, and nothing happened.