Designing Schizophrenia With Reggie Watts

Given that Reggie Watts creates the ideas for his performance literally as he hits the stage, it’s no wonder the man has never repeated a show in his life.

Dipping into and out of a kaleidoscope of accents, dialects and musical styles, Watts’ next move is impossible to predict; the man simply trusts in his own abilities and throws himself into the experience, displaying a dynamic and staggeringly impressive musical ability laced with absurdist, abstract theatrics and time-bomb psych-twist comedy using little more than his own voice, a loop pedal and, occasionally, a piano.

It’s weird, it’s fucked up, and it’s also jaw-droppingly amazing. See for yourself:

Abandoning all sense of conventional performance structure, Watts is truly a man unhinged from the reality box – but don’t let that mislead you into thinking he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s a master of improvisation and impressionism, a freak of brilliance with the comedic stylings of a jazz virtuoso.

If there were ever a time for Watts to hit the stratosphere, it’s now. He’s riding a career high as the opening act on Conan O’Brien’s notoriously epic Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour, and the buzz is growing rapidly for the walking anomaly with the explosive afro of grey-streaked black hair.

I caught up with Reggie the morning after he utterly killed at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, finding the wildly prolific comic musician feeling accomplished but far from satiated in his desire to turn the world on to a man who New York Magazine writer Sam Anderson so accurately referred to as “half-man, half-astral-funk Muppet.”

Antiquiet: As far as your onstage delivery goes and the way your set progresses, it’s very easy to draw comparisons to jazz, with the phrasing, spontaneity and shifting dynamics. Would you agree that there are some intimate comparisons to be made between music and comedy?

Reggie Watts: Oh yeah, without a doubt. Jazz is a great comparison because there’s this wonderful structure, things are resonant and in harmony, but when it breaks open to the solos anything can happen. Even with experimental jazz, where it just starts off crazy right off the bat. Having a lot of training in a certain area and then basically breaking all the rules of the training is kind of an element I use in my show. I don’t really see that big of a difference between music and comedy, because when comedians are sitting and joking around with each other it’s very similar to a jam session. People are listening, people are adding ideas, people are playing over each other, someone’s waiting for their next in, and there’s a pocket and they jump in. They just keep it going, keep it cooking. I think because of my musical training I think that has a lot to do with how I view comedy or how I perform. It’s all the same physics.

Antiquiet: It seems that training is vitally important when it comes to this high-intensity level of versatility. I’m always brought back to something I read a long while back about Pete Townshend, advising a kid not to take guitar lessons, to master the instrument intuitively. It always struck me as odd, because it seems that knowledge is key when it comes to understanding what’s possible in the range of technique and vocabulary one can develop with it. It’s interesting to look at the argument of training versus intuitive immersion.

Reggie Watts: Some people are incredible at intuitively building their own expression mechanisms. I’m glad I did the training because it’s about understanding for me, understanding what I’m talking about, whether it’s technology or classical music. I want to put something out there so that if someone who’s interested in that particular area can say “yeah, he knows what he’s talking about.” Whether it’s jazz or heavy metal or industrial or whatever… so for me, it’s really important to at least kind of know what I’m talking about. But the rest of it, aside from classical training, was self-learned. That’s just me being in tons of bands and listening to shitloads of different types of styles of music. Talking with people, reading about things, reading online about histories… I’m always learning about art and about people, even in mundane jobs. I like to talk to people and find out how they think about things or what they think about things, like the world and politics and all that. I don’t really memorize it, I just kind of expose myself to it. So while I have training, I also am a big believer in self-training. You really need to be proactive and study the things you’re interested in. Otherwise you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities.

Check out Fuck Shit Stack, which is quite cheerfully NSFW:

Antiquiet: It seems you could only benefit from adding those colors to your palette.

Reggie Watts: Pete’s right, to a certain extent. Punk rock music, music with that energy, a lot of it is untrained. There are thousands of untrained musicians out there who are making great livings, who just learned by having a teacher or some kind of influence. Really, there’s no such thing as not being trained. You’re trained by the industry or art form you come into just by being exposed to it. I’m sure he’s talking about formalized structure and school and all that.