Reggie Watts

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.

Sometimes, it’s not even the bit that he is performing that makes him funny, but rather the incredible confidence he has on stage. So much of his material requires an open minded audience, a group of people that won’t scoff at a grown man making robot and cat noises into a microphone (He could easily have a disastrous show if he was performing for a group of stiff-necks). I sat in awe as this grown man fumbled with his microphone for several minutes, flailing the cord against the keyboard keys. This is what makes his work so satisfyingly strange; he is like a dada artist of comedy and song. His humor is the final evolutionary step of the ‘anti-joke’, as in ‘why didn’t the skeleton cross the road?’ ‘A skeleton is an inanimate object. It has no mode of locomotion’. Reggie Watts’ stage is where traditional, boring comedy goes to die, and subsequently be raised from the dead as a remarkably weird post-modernistic miasma of flow-of-consciousness poetry.

His prowess with such simple recording devices must be noted. He works his entire show with a looping machine, a keyboard, a mixer, and a couple of microphones. However, this small arsenal pales in comparison to his natural talent for one of the oddest of arts: beatboxing. It would be difficult to describe beatboxing as a skill for a man to take time to consciously refine, but clearly, Watts’ knows what he is doing. Every song he performs is accompanied by a fresh beat, just as freeform as his lyrics are. This makes every show unique, because, outside of a few songs or stories that he might bring from one show to the next, every performance is improvised from start to finish.

Beatboxing, to me, is not something I thought I would continue to be impressed with beyond of the sixth grade. Watts’ beatboxing skills, though, are something of legend. He doesn’t do anything totally unique, choosing to tread on the well-worn path making beats with multiple layers of high and low sounds, looping them, and then adding more and more layers to the product. It’s difficult to describe how tightly tuned his work sounds in the end. I listened to a compilation of his recordings and found that, even when he isn’t trying to be funny, he can create a decent soundscape that surrounds the listener in the murmuring, muttering nonsense of his improvised lyrics.

                I love his style. He is akin to Bill Bailey in the way that he blends music and densely bizarre, but still cerebral humor into a flavorful paste. He certainly isn’t for everyone; this kind of comedy must be experienced with an open mind and a penchant for the weird. If you can get past his odd pacing and unorthodox approach to stand up comedy, you’ll find a fantastic source of unique brilliance. Reggie Watts is some kind of genius. I can’t recommend him enough. For this, ‘Why Shit So Crazy’ gets a 9.2/10.0.

Thanks for reading!

W