Brian Says

Why watch Brian

Brian Says is the stage name, and it’s a good one, because it works as a promise. Brian says things. Some of them you were thinking. Most of them you were hoping nobody would say out loud in a room with a microphone.

He took the long way to Austin, by way of Virginia and Atlanta, and arrived in the city that has turned itself into comedy’s busiest job fair. Austin rewards two kinds of comic: the ones who show up every night and the ones who make a strong impression in sixty seconds. Brian has been trying to be both.

The sixty-second version happened on Kill Tony. He made his debut on episode 679, the Matt Rife episode, taped in front of the show’s live crowd in Austin. For anyone who hasn’t watched, Kill Tony is a gauntlet: one minute of material, then an interview with Tony Hinchcliffe and Brian Redban that can go much worse than the minute did. It is the fastest way in modern comedy to find out if you can think on your feet, and a surprising number of people find out that they can’t. Brian could. He has since gone viral with a clip of him and Hinchcliffe trading gay-trivia questions, which is the kind of exchange you can’t write and can’t fake.

He calls himself an “Old god,” which tells you about the persona: confident, theatrical and pleased with itself in a way that invites the audience to argue. The joke is that he’s probably not wrong about how much he’s seen. Comics who start later in life tend to arrive with more material than technique, and the interesting part of watching one is seeing the technique catch up.

That’s why he’s on this list. Brian Says is early, which is the point of a list like this. He doesn’t have the television credits yet or the half-hour special. He has a stage name that doubles as a mission statement, a Kill Tony debut, a growing following in one of the most competitive scenes in the country, and the nerve to call himself a god before anyone has handed him the paperwork. We’ve seen less get further.