For those of you who don't know, Reggie Watts is a comedian/musician/beat-boxer/actor/professional disinformationalist. He currently costars with Scott Auckerman on IFC's Comedy Bang Bang. He also tours around the country with a killer stand-up/improv show. If you can't make it to a show, you can catch his work on Netflix in his special Reggie Watts: Why $#!+ So Crazy? He was also just featured on a Flight Facilities track Sunshine and starred in the music video. Fair warning: you will play this song on repeat for days.
Reggie's performances are unlike anything I've seen. Aside from his immense musical talent (he creates songs on the fly using only his voice and a looping machine), he's got this intense, totally unique energy. Watch him for five minutes and you'll understand what I mean. Where other performers try to ingratiate themselves with the audience, or at least seek some sort of connection even if that connection is hostile, Reggie keeps his audience at arms length. It's like he intentionally sabotages any attempt to relate to him, to get inside his head. As soon as you feel like you've got your bearings, he's off in a new direction, and not even checking to see if you've followed. His performance is so unexpected, so random, that it is impossible to get him, to put yourself in his shoes. Performers usually get big, become popular, by becoming your imaginary best friend. Reggie leaves you cold. He's in his own head. Most times, he seems barely aware there's an audience there at all. If he notices you, he usually just spouts gibberish, daring you to look for meaning in his set.
So how come he's so much fun to watch? How can a show that tries it's darndest to logically confuse you feel so emotionally fulfilling?
Because Reggie Watts is a fictional character. (A-ha! there's my lead--buried as usual)
One of my boyfriend's favorite things to say about Reggie is, "we don't even know what his real voice sounds like!" That's Reggie in a nutshell. What's real? Maybe nothing. But what is real anyway? On stage, in your imagination, it's all real. And maybe that's his point.
There's a clue that he's written into one of his songs, called Fuck Shit Stack (obviously, warning for gratuitous swearing).
I like to create a buffer memory of incredulity
So y'all motherfuckers could never get near to me
I'm a cartoon character
You'll never be able to be like me
This barrier between himself and the audience, the way he intentionally confuses, his impulsiveness, his sabotage of any real human connections, makes himself--makes Reggie Watts--unreal. This unrealness makes it possible for the audience to just go with it. You know that feeling when you're watching a standup teeter on the edge of bombing, and the desperation just makes you want to vom? That feeling when you change the channel because you're embarrassed at how earnest Dancing With the Stars is, and how hard it's failing? When you identify with someone onstage, when you see the humanness, when you see yourself up there, it's hard to watch. It's hard to trust that they're going to be good, because if you were up there you'd be shitting your pants. (or maybe this is just me? I'm pretty sure it's a thing...)
With Reggie, there's none of that. He is so alien and unreal, you can just sit back and watch. You don't have to be holding your breath waiting for him to fuck up. He was never even interested in not. He doesn't even get the concept of fucking up. As much as we don't relate to him, he doesn't relate to us. The wall protects us both equally. It frees him up to quit worrying about the audience, and just go with it.
This lack of intimacy is some how more intimate than a standard performance. Because it gets you deeper. And to a state many of us have forgotten how to visit. The state of play.
To watch a Reggie Watts show is to return to childhood, in a sense. Everything about it says, relax man. Let's just play. His lack of distinction between truth and fiction, his improv based sets and songs, his run-on sentences and elaborate stories, they're all somehow nostalgic, because it's how you used to process the world. Seven year olds do this all the time. Make up epic Shakespearian stories for Barbie and Ken on the fly, compose songs, become best friends with strangers. The thing that makes Reggie so appealing is he's just like, let's play man. Like kids that just met in Chuckie Cheese and both like the ball pit and pizza, because we're best friends. When you're seven, that's all you needed. Remember?
He lacks social cues, those pesky things that ruined your life in middle school. There's no expectations, no projections, no anticipation. He's just doing his thing, and you do yours. He is one half of an adult social experience--which is really just two people peering out from their own little worlds, judging each other. But if you want to play, if you can let go of your expectations and judgements, you can get into his world. And it's a trippy place.
Reggie doesn't joke, not directly. He plays with the world and perception. He says things you know aren't true, but they feel true. Or he says things you think are jokes, but turn out to be deep personal expressions. He comes at the world from unusual angles. He forces you to improvise, to have authentic reactions to things you thought you knew by rote. Often, he'll be scatting in a song, singing nonsense, for minutes at a time, and then finally you realize he's actually saying words, and maybe has been for awhile, and the words mean something, and you agree. He gives you little, precious moments of connection that emerge from the sea of sound and color like moments of sudden lucidity. And you laugh with surprise and delight, like a baby playing peek a boo.
What he's really doing is taking you on a trip. He's dulling your senses, your inhibitions, your boring and fucking suffocating everyday expectations about life and what a performance is and what is funny. He's a drug. And his brand of comedy is a little bit addicting.
Let's deal with some pretentious freshman semiotics for a second: a thing is defined by what it is not. A girl is not a boy. An opera is not a play. A death is not a birth. Isn't it refreshing to get back to a space where the nots don't exist? Where definitions aren't important? Where your baggage and your walls and all the things that hold you back aren't?
It's addicting, remembering who you were before you.
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| that's deep man... |
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