Reggie Watts: Why Shit So Crazy?
The line between madness and genius is a thin one, and only a few artists can walk it without their work becoming too convoluted to enjoy. That being said, Reggie Watts doesn’t just walk this line, he waltzes it. In his hour long special ‘Why Shit So Crazy?’, Watts, without any explanation or introduction to his style of humor, dissects both modern comedy and music with an analytical scalpel. Watts examines the most tired pop music clichés and uses them as a kind of lyrical white-noise. We’ve heard these lines so many times that, while Watts is sometimes incomprehensible, the cliché phrases are always easily understood, as they are exactly what we expect to hear. He improvises with off-the-cuff, apropos-of-nothing storytelling, nonsensical songs and a kind of scat singing that is made up of disconnected fragments of jazz/soul/funk melodies, bizarre advice, and more random stories, all glued together with a spackle of rambling, meaningless noises. Listening to him sing over his live-recorded, looped beatboxing is akin to searching the airwaves for a clear radio signal, only to pass over multiple different stations and receive a garbled mix of static and snippets of programming. His comedy is almost subliminally entertaining; sometimes, you won’t even know why you’re laughing. Quite a few times, without ever telling a joke, Reggie Watts had me laughing hysterically.
