All of the comics in the neighborhood wish they could be like Reggie Watts. By Patrick Rapa
In the music world, there are a few people who kinda sorta do what Reggie Watts does: looping, beatboxing, building up songs with nothing but an acrobatic tongue and an effects pedal. Nobody really walks the same improv tightrope, but fellow knob-twirlers and pedal pushers, like Owen Pallett or tUnE-yArDs, they know what’s up.
As for the comedy world? There he’s very much alone.
In fact, when Watts landed the opening spot for Conan O’Brien’s post-Tonight Show march across America — the Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour — few knew enough about the man to raise an eyebrow.
Watts was the viral video guy, whose “What About Blowjobs” scored 800,000 hits for CollegeHumor. Or he was the dude from Maktub, the straight-up serious jam-soul band from Seattle.
Next thing you knew, the man with the louder-than-Cosby sweaters, the bigger-than-?uestlove ’fro and a voice like Terence Trent D’Arby gone to heaven had landed the hottest support spot in showbiz. Some comedy writer friends dropped his name. CoCo watched a few videos on YouTube and gave the thumbs-up. And the ball got rolling.
“Oh, it was incredible,” recalls Watts, on the phone from his childhood home in Montana. “I mean, I don’t know if there’s going to be another comedy tour like it, ever… you know, unless Conan decides to go out on the road again.”
It was a big-time operation: catering, fancy hotels, large capacity houses, props, writers and a crew that operated like a “military operation, but military with compassion,” he says. “It was this crazy marriage of, like, top-notch TV production and top-notch road production.”
Since then, Watts has turned up on the Conan TBS show a dozen times, always landing a few deadpan quips and then launching into some on-the-spot musical weirdness.
“There’s a lot of experimentation and it basically just comes out of a need—me wanting to do something stupid onstage, you know, something that I think is ridiculous.” And the goal? “A really confusing and disorienting and just a really stupid experience.”
It’s not all improv, of course. There’s that blowjob song, and the brilliantly esoteric “Fuck Shit Stack,” another viral hit, which starts with some breathy beatboxing and proceeds to dissect popular hip-hop to its component parts. “Yo, uhh. Word. Adjective. Pronoun. Adverb. Run on and on and on. Where my gerunds at?” His rapid-fire mimicry goes from laid-back Del tha Funky Homosapien slow-drawling to some Humpty Hump nasalness to a clunky, grimy Streets kinda thing. “I like women. I like women. I like the concept of a woman. I like to take that concept and reduce it to an object.”
It’s brainy, and dorky, and biting, but it’s also most definitely a part of the genre it’s satirizing.
“I don’t really know any hip-hoppers, although when I meet hip-hop cats casually around a club or whatever, they seem to be cool with it because we speak the language of rhythm.” he says. “I also appreciate the borrowing nature of hip-hop.”
Thanks to his toy collection, Watts’ favorite artist to sample is himself. He runs down his equipment checklist, and it’s a blur of soundboard nerdiness: the Roland RV-5 reverb pedal, the BOSS RC-5, the Electro-Harmonix 2880, and so on. “If I could make a hybrid between all of those pedals, that would be awesome. But you know, the thing about technology is that you’ll never find something that does everything you need it to do,” he says. “If I could just have a design team, an engineering team and the money to do it, I could probably create a pretty near perfect looping machine, for at least my purposes.”
In between songs, Watts likes to sprinkle in a few head-tilting bits of fiction—stuff about the supposed good old days touring with the Oak Ridge Boys (in some unnamed capacity), or how he’s BFFs with Thom Yorke. As with Watts’ music, the comedy comes in slow, like the tide, until finally you get it and get swept up by it. It’s funny because it’s unexpected, a reinvention of the usual concert experience.
“Yeah, I’ve done music, and I can imitate sounds and things like that, but I also have a love for just ridiculous abstract things, inspired by things like The State or Monty Python or The Muppet Show,” he says. “I think with improvisation, for me and other comedians that I know that like to riff, they’re just really playing off of that chaos.”
