Comedian Brian Regan will stop at Madison’s Orpheum Theater on Friday as part of his 2025 national tour. Regan’s stop in Madison marks his first performance in years in the state’s capital city. Performing within a year and a half in the same city would go against an unwritten theory of performance business, Regan said.

“You wouldn’t want to come back to a city sooner than a year and a half from the previous time,” Regan said “I don’t know who came up with the theory, but that’s the theory.”

Since his last recorded stop in Madison in 2008, Regan has added many feathers to his cap, appearing in several Netflix specials including “Nunchucks and Flamethrowers” and “Brian Regan on the Rocks.” Most recently, Regan co-starred in the TV series “Loudermilk,” playing the part of Winston “Mugsy” Bennigan.

Regan’s Friday night appearance in Madison will mark one stop on a decades-long Pan-American tour that has had no beginning or end, he said. For those wondering what kind of hardware it takes to sustain such a mobile act, Regan travels by tour bus, oftentimes in and out of a city on the same night.

“I am a super big shot, and I take a super big shot bus,” Regan said.

You might expect the pressure to produce an ever-evolving cache of jokes and bits to be exhausting, but writing on the road is one of the most enjoyable parts of the job, according to Regan.

“That’s part of the fun in doing this, having something pop into my head that I think is an idea for a bit and being able to hop on a stage and give it a go,” Regan said.

For those wondering whether the veteran comic still gets butterflies before performing in front of crowds after more than 40 years of practice, the answer is yes — but only occasionally.

For Regan, performance anxiety has nothing to do with the size of the crowd but with the setting of the venue. Performing in a sold-out arena in front of Brian Regan fans is not nerve-racking, but being a guest on a late-night talk show, for instance, and having to win over an audience is different, Regan said.

“The audience is there to watch a TV taping. They’re not there to see me. I’ll come out through the curtain, and they’re like ‘Oh, ok, I guess there’s a comedian on this show.’ So you have to win people over who are there for another reason,” Regan said.

Fortunately for Regan, Friday’s audience at the Orpheum will be there to see him and him only.