Musical comedian Reggie Watts is in Tucson on Friday, performing at 191 Toole.
The phrase “one man band” is a bit of a cliché, but it may well be the most accurate way to describe Watts’s work. His performances are often completely improvised - it’s just him and a handful of synthesizers and loop pedals on stage. Watts comes out, starts monologuing, then segues into musical riffs, then shifts abruptly back to more traditional stand-up.
Watts joined The Show to talk about how it's a very unique experience, and it only works because he takes the musical part of his act seriously.
Full conversation
REGGIE WATTS: I love getting stuff right, you know, if I'm gonna do something, and I want it to feel like, you know, I know what it is. And, you know, and I, and I genuinely like all forms of music. I kind of just think of it all as one language.
I just see it as a, as a one huge human family language, and so the, the more that I know, you know, whether it's like Irish.
[SONG CLIP]
WATTS: Or, you know, shamanic style music of different cultures or whether it's modern electronic music.
[SONG CLIP]
WATTS: I, I love all of it, so like, I like celebrating that in my performances.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost like you're talking about music as part of the language, the way that somebody who's like a traditional stand up might have a mastery of like accents or dialects or use idioms a certain way.
WATTS: Oh, 100%, yeah, for sure. Well, because music also translates, carries way more information, which can, which can elicit obviously a very large reaction. Words are very powerful, but music has so much more information in it.
DINGMAN: Yeah, when you started out performing, was your goal to do the two forms, music and comedy, distinctly, or did you always want your performance persona to, to blend them together?
WATTS: I kind of want them to, to be one thing, although I do like treating them, you know, as separate things as well, because it's fun to, you know, make people forget.
[COMEDY CLIP] Have you guys ever like made like muffins or anything like that? You know what I'm saying? And you'd be like, what can I, how can I spice this up, you know. And then you just take like a bunch of weed and s***, you know, and just like, just throw it in the muffin mix and then it kind of looks like a really gooey salad or something like that and you bake it, it's awful, but it gets you really high and a couple of your friends think they have to go to the hospital and, and we're trying everything to make them not dial 911 because you know that it will pass and no one's ever died of that, of paranoia anyway.
DINGMAN: So the other component of all this that I, I wanna ask you about is improvisation, because I know that you will build sometimes an entire performance spontaneously. What's exciting to you about the idea of not having a net when you build a whole performance, a whole evening that way?
WATTS: For me, it's, it's, it's required because I, I need to know that what I'm doing is what I'm paying attention to. And I don't like being, you know, unconscious about things, and, there is just something really rewarding about, about just going in.
I don't have anything planned. I'm gonna go in and, you know, do something.
[COMEDY CLIP] Here's what I think. If you're good to people in general, no matter who they are. Then you're just being good to people, OK, and that's a good example that I like to say that I like to start out with, that I'd like to begin with, that I like to just get out of the way cause I like to do a lot of things as long as I can do them. As long as I can do them is when I like to say that people throughout history have always had their day, had they not been the one from the first to the start, it's not to say that they would never know the knocks, knocking things over, yes, it's the thing you can do when you're moving through, crowd and you can't see the blue of the darkness in the darkness as the millipedes do crawl upon your feet, and yet you feel as though the roaches, they will bleed. And as you do the thing and the demon does recede from the recesses of your imagination up on stage. And when you see lots of space between the barricade and me, well, that's just an indication of an overprecautiousness by unions. Which are important …
DINGMAN: As a last question, Reggie, I wanted to ask, you are somebody who has been at the vanguard of, of comedy for quite a while now, and I think of you as somebody who has remained relevant and interesting and revered through a lot of different eras in comedy, you know, whether it's the height of like improv and sketch, whether it was kind of like the rebirth of stand up and storytelling and that sort of thing. What do you think is kind of the dominant characteristic in comedy right now, and, and how do you feel about it?
WATTS: I mean, I don't really know what it is. I think, I think because currently right now with the rise of authoritarianism and the threat of fascism and those types of things, you know, that are more realistic than ever. Comedy has a different purpose, you know, comedy changes throughout the decades.
It's, it's an opportunity for people to kind of remind human beings of what, what, what we're here for, you know, which is creativity, collaboration, helpfulness, solution solving, you know, all of these other traits that are, you know, are essentially viruses, you know, in the operating, human operating system, have to be eradicated and, and moved beyond because they they serve no no one and nothing and they're primitive and like we should have been beyond this, you know, decades ago.
But, but it still holds, and so, I think comedy and absurdity, especially, is an incredibly powerful tool because it gets people out of a dread state and shows them hope, which is, which gives them the opportunity to view multiple solutions ahead.
DINGMAN: Wow.
