Mix Master

Reggie Watts blends music and mischief in his one-of-a-kind stand-up.
By John Bolster

With his gifts as a mimic, nonsense-talker, singer, and human beatboxer, Reggie Watts could be a deluxe crowd-pleaser if he wanted to be. He can enthrall an audience by building a song with nothing more than a loop pedal and his own vocal talents, or make them giddy with an absurd, improvised monologue.

But Reggie Watts doesn’t always aim to please the crowd. Sometimes he likes to confuse them, or befuddle them—throw them off balance. His interests are too wide-ranging and he’s too mischievous to create a straightforward dynamic with his audience. He prefers a more disorienting relationship. But make no mistake: Watts has the tools to be a megastar, and he routinely creates magic on stage with his on-the-spot beatbox creations and ludicrous ramblings. We got him on the phone to tell us how he does it, how it started, and how to handle a Scottish heckler.

Your act is not easy to describe for someone who hasn’t seen it. For starters, can you tell our readers what a “loop pedal” is?
A loop pedal is kind of like a fancy tape recorder. You record something by pressing record but when you press stop, it keeps repeating the thing it just recorded, over and over again. And you can subsequently add on top of that.

How many tracks can you add?
Well, it depends on a couple of things. The main one I use is a standard loop pedal. Once you record and you loop, you can add as much as you want, but the machine only has so much memory, so it elegantly fades out the earlier tracks that you put down, to allocate new memory. It’s kind of like looking at a map with a flashlight in the dark—as you progress, the other stuff fades away and the new stuff takes its place. I have an other loop pedal that has four tracks and 64 giga bytes of memory. So I could record an hour-long loop if I wanted to. But I just lay down a loop, then move to the next track, and so on—and you can control the volume levels of each one. That’s a different style of looping, a more advanced version. How did you start using this machine? It was a gradual process. I started using it as a scratch pad—putting down tracks to show the guys in my band—then I thought, Maybe I could entertain people for a few minutes in between songs, and then eventually I thought, Wow, I could probably do a whole show using just this one device. It was a slow evolution.

Your act is so unconventional that there’s almost no room for one, but have you ever had a heckler?
Oh, yeah. One of the first times I got heckled badly, or potentially badly, was in Scotland, the first year I performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My show was totally improvised—and I had to fill an hour. And I had 28 shows to do. It was completely like, “Okay, good luck!” So I’m onstage and some Scottish guy says, “Go back in your hole!” Initially, I thought, Oh, that’s so mean. But then I turned to the audience and I said, “I’m so sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s a colleague of mine. He’s a fellow time traveler, and he’s just wishing me well. It’s an expression we use: ‘Go back in your hole,’ as in, ‘We hope you find the right portal to get back to your own time period.’ ”

[Laughs] Did that shut him up?
He didn’t say anything for the rest of the show. But I’m not really one of those guys that’s gonna take someone on. There are guys that are so good at that—ripping the shit out of somebody. Usually I ignore it, or sometimes I’ll continue saying things as if I didn’t hear it, but then I start talking about that person, only in the same pacing that I was talking about other stuff. So most of the time they don’t get that they’re being talked about. That’s fun; some people in the audience get it and other people are like, “What’s going on?”

You’ve talked about Victor Borge. There are obvious differences between you and him, but there are also similarities—music mixed with comedy, sight gags, silly contexts. Was he a big influence on you?
I’d say that he was definitely an influence on me. I remember him from when I was a kid; I remember him on The Electric Company and on variety shows. But really he provides more of an example for me. A lot of people think of music-comedy as a new thing. But that’s just not true. His existence is an example of the history of music and comedy [being combined]. It’s probably been around since court jesters, and before that.

What were you like as a kid? Were you always into performing?
Yeah, I was. I was always a class clown. When I moved to the United States at age four, I was speaking Spanish primarily. Because I couldn’t communicate perfectly I would do silly things and people would laugh. In elementary school, I think it was in fourth grade, I convinced my principal to let me do a school play. I just suddenly wanted to do that, and the way that I sold it was, I said it was an anti-drug play.

[Laughs] You were a fourth-grade drug czar.
I wasn’t anti-drugs; I didn’t really care about drugs either way. I just wanted to make a show. So they made a special assembly, and I filled up ziplock bags full of flour for cocaine, and oregano for weed. I played an undercover cop and there was some drug deal or something—it was really horrible. But they let me do it and the whole school came out and saw it, 300 kids.

How much of your current act is improvised?
I’d say about 90 percent.

How do you replenish the well of resources you call on for that?
Well, a lot of it’s just being in a good mood—getting onstage and being excited about performing. But also a lot comes from my natural interests. I love technology, and I love people, and I love design. I like knowing why things are the way they are and why people will say a particular thing. I’m always interested in my surroundings and noticing the little things that people may pass by a hundred times without stopping to see what they’re about. And it’s fucking around, too—I like fucking around with language a lot. I’m always joking around with language, and saying things at the wrong time, or using the wrong expression, and then seeing how people react. So all of that kind of comes into play onstage.

Your act really impacts an audience that doesn’t know you, but how do you wow a crowd that does know you?
Well, I have to work the other way in, so to speak—come in at the other end. But generally the strategy is the same. I try to figure out different ways to come onstage, different ways to address the audience. And people are still just as confused, because I can use their expectations against them. They’ll still get some of what they expect, but sometimes it really comes in handy, being able to subvert people’s expectations.