Thriller first caught Reggie Watts at Bonnaroo 2008, when . . . the comedian/musician/weirdo was opening for another comedian/musician/weirdo – Zach Galifianakis.  Not knowing who he was, and being a little impatient for Galifianakis to take the stage, Watts’ set was greeted with intense skepticism, which slowly turned into mild interest, which quickly became incapacitating laughter.

Watts isn’t really a comedian.  He doesn’t have setups and punch lines.  The proper word would be entertainer.  It is fitting that in the following interview Watts talks about vaudeville.  He is like a 21st century vaudeville performer, using music, body language, tones of voice, anything really, to be funny.  His most interesting talent – apart from creating mini symphonies from scratch using nothing but his voice and a loop pedal – is his approach to language.  Every great comedian must have a command of language, but for Watts, language is a joke in itself.  Thus, he will spend several minutes at a time spewing long, complex sentences with very technical, SAT vocab words, which sound good until one realizes that he isn’t making any sense.  Or, he will begin telling a story in a British accent, which will imperceptibly meld into a valley girl voice, which will meld into a gangsta voice and end with Watts speaking German.

Watts recently released an album and DVD called Why Shit So Crazy?  He spoke to Thriller about the new album and the life of an up-and-coming comedian.

The interesting thing about your album is that it’s definitely not a traditional comedy album, which fits because you’re not a traditional comedian.  Where did all of those little skits and weird bits come from?

I think all of those were from the stage show, although some of them might have been from the recording studio.  The problem with it is that the studio stuff was made so quickly, and then we kind of chose through so much material that sometimes I forget what’s what.

You just got done with Conan O’Brien’s “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television” tour, right?

Yeah, that’s correct.  It just finished.

What was that like?

It was very surreal, but at the same time, I adjusted to it probably about halfway through in a way that made me feel a little more comfortable.  It turned into a big family, especially at the end.  The last day was kind of like the senior assembly or something like that.  Like, “Here’s our skits.”  And then, you know, someone bursts in on someone’s sketch.  It was very much like a huge family, and the whole crew was just incredible.  Every crew member was like, “This is the best tour I’ve ever been on,” and some of these guys have been touring for thirty-one years.

Conan has been part of some of the best comedy of the last few decades, from The Simpsons, to Saturday Night Live, to Late Night and The Tonight Show.  Did you guys ever just discuss comedy, or did you get any words of wisdom from him?

Not really.  We talked in little chunks, little bursts here and there, but we didn’t get to talk philosophically or anything like that.  I think he’s under the weight of so many possibilities right now; it never got to a point where he was so relaxed.  Andy Richter, on the other hand – totally awesome conversations.  Sometimes we’d share a dressing room together, although we just talked about stuff.  We didn’t talk about the industry so much.

Music seems to be the backbone of your comedy.  What is the connection for you?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* I think that music can be funny in so many ways.  Music, in a way, is an advanced form of communication because it’s not dependent on language so much.  It is a language, but it’s not dependent on national languages or spoken language.  So, it’s very complicated.  It’s a very high-resolution form of communication.  You can make people laugh with the tempo of a song, you can make people laugh with the texture of a song, you can make people laugh by cutting it off or just hitting notes at the wrong times, you can make people laugh by alluding to a familiar melody that doesn’t seem to make sense with what’s going on musically.  It’s a very intense, option-based form of communication.  If someone understands music and they have a good sense of humor, then they can use it really well – they can use music solely as a form of making people laugh, or alternating between serious moments where something is seriously great and then just completely stupid.  The contrast between those two also creates a great laugh.  Music can definitely be completely comedic, along with being very moving.  That’s what I love about artists like Victor Borge.  Back in the day, [he] was a virtuosic piano player, kicked ass, but he also had these goofy ideas and these crazy shticky things.  He’d just throw away the fact that he was such an amazing pianist.  Or even Steve Martin to a certain extent with his banjo.  He’s a really accomplished banjo player, but he’d just kind of fuck around on it, and you wouldn’t quite notice it.  In a way, it’s kind of an old-school vaudeville thing.  There were a lot of really virtuosic performers that did goofy, stupid, silly things in contrast to their proficiency.

I’ve heard that much of your set is improvised.  Is that true?

Most of it is improvised.  There are definitely some bits that I’ll do – like, I’ll do the “Horse walks into a bar” joke, or I’ll do the “New York City Squirrel” joke, or sometimes I’ll just tell a real story that happened to me in high school, like, Robitussin stories.  I’ll just tell a long Robitussin story.  But, for the most part, everything is improvised.  If I’m really connecting with it, then almost the whole thing is new stuff.

I want to ask you about your use of language, and there are two ways I want to approach it.  First – you will often start speaking in rapid bursts, using big words and academic or scientific terms, and it sounds like you are making a point, but if you listen carefully, you’re actually just saying nonsense.  Where does that come from?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* I think it definitely comes from my musical background, in that I really enjoy the way things sound just purely for sound’s sake.  I like how constructed sentences sound, and that’s interesting to me.  Also, certain words just sound ridiculous.  You don’t have to do much to them; the joke’s already there.

Do you have any favorite words?

Sibilant words are always great.  I love the word “creams.”  I like talking about, I can’t remember, it was a few gigs ago, I talked about how I owned a cream factory and we provide most of the world’s creams and salves, and we also create cream cheese.  It’s just like this really stupid shit about creams and salves.  I like any words like “consortium,” just using big words that would be used in the sciences or business school.

It reminds me of Professor Irwin Corey.  Have you ever heard of him?

No.

He was a comedian in the ’50s and ’60s who pretended to be a professor, and he’d use really big, fancy words but he’d never say anything that made sense.

That’s awesome [laughs].

The other way you use language is really fascinating – you will start telling a story, and as the story progresses, you will seamlessly shift between accents and languages.  So, you might start with a British accent, then halfway through you’ll shift the sounds of the words until you’re talking like a valley girl, and then the sounds will slowly shift again until you’re speaking German.  Where did that idea come from?

I guess there’s a certain amount of magic that I enjoy.  I’ve always been into magic.  When you’re on stage and you’re performing, you’re essentially creating illusions, especially if it’s comedy.  There are tricks that you’re doing on stage.  I think the idea of someone speaking and their accent slowly changing in and out is kind of cool.  It’s first of all really stupid that someone’s doing that at all, and it just sounds great.  It kind of unifies the idea of language – that it’s all communication, and when you hear them next to each other, you hear how ridiculous they sound against one another.  But, I try to go between accents, dialects, actual languages, or the idea of language, or leaving out bits of the conversation, or my voice sounds like you’re underwater, like you’ve gone deaf a little bit.  I like that idea, because I’m not really a joke writer, so my jokes are those.  Those are my jokes.  Not necessarily like, “Boy is it blah blah blah,” and then “Ha ha ha ha ha.”  Once in a while I might come up with one of those by accident through improvising, but that’s just not my thing.  So, that’s interesting to me – that idea of things shifting, or just suddenly changing into something completely different instantaneously in the middle of where the one thing was going.

It’s interesting because all great comedians have a knack for language – for finding the exact right word or phrase that will make something funny.  But, for you, language is a joke in itself.

Yeah, it’s pointing things out that normally you wouldn’t analyze.  I mean, that’s what comedians do best, I suppose.  They point out some stupid little tiny thing that you’re like, “I would never think about that.”

Your act is so different from a traditional comedy routine.  I’d imagine it makes it harder to start out as a comedian when you don’t really have anything that people can identify as “comedy.”  Did you find it hard to get people to accept you when you first started?

For the most part, people accepted it.  The secret is including ingredients they’re familiar with.  When I was younger, like in high school, doing standup, I would do Bill Cosby impersonations, and I would do gags like pulling underwear out of my pants or something, or doing some kind of dance to a Michael Jackson song.  That’s how I would get people on my side.  Sing a popular song in a really weird way, or a stupid way.  As long as you care about the audience, you can go as weird as you want, you know?

You also make serious music.  When you use music for comedy, is it hard to get people to take the serious music seriously?

It can be a little confusing, but I’ve been doing the comedy thing most recently, so most people will say something like, “Wow, you sound really great.  Have you ever thought about just doing music, like a career in music?”  I’m always like, I really can’t explain to them that I’ve done music all my life.  The comedy thing is a newer thing.  Most people know me for that.  I haven’t released a music music album in a long time, so I don’t know how that will be received after being perceived as a comedian for so long.

I’m familiar with the life of a musician – what it’s like to start a band, what it’s like to go on tour, and all that.  But, I have no idea what it’s like to start as a comedian and work your way up, go on tour, et cetera.  You’ve done both.  What is the difference between the two?

The big difference is that, with comedy, it feels more like – I never skateboarded – but it feels like skateboarding.  I think there would be more commonalities between a comedian and skateboarders who go from competition to competition.  The performance aspect is like you’re on deck, you’re waiting for your turn, and especially if you’re part of a crew of comedians, you go up and you kind of go for a run, and you’ve got all these different tricks, and you can line up different things, and you can put together different patterns that you think are going to work with the audience compared with who’s just been on before you.  The touring thing is mostly solo.  Everybody tours solo for the most part, unless they are the tour and they’re a big touring act, and they’ve brought their friends on the road.  Most comedians I know – like, when I see Morgan Murphy on the road, or when I see Natasha Leggero, or Sarah Silverman or any of these people – they’re solo.  They fly in by themselves, go straight to the hotel, the representative of the festival gives them a packet, and they show up to the club and someone gives them the rundown.  With a band, it’s a totally different thing.  It’s more, “Here we are.  We’re rolling into town. We gotta go to sound check.”  It’s a lot more production, and comedy doesn’t have that production.

It’s just you.

Yeah, you literally just walk on the stage and start talking.

It seems like that lifestyle would be lonely.

*CLICK TO LISTEN* [sings] No more lonely nights.  It definitely gets lonely for sure, and anyone who says it doesn’t is lying.  But many comedians have some form of melancholy involved with why they’re doing comedy in the first place.  When you’re traveling, just doing gigs and gigs, I know a lot of comedians that drive from gig to gig and do the club circuit, and it’s definitely a lonely thing.  For me, I’ve been on airplanes mostly for the past three or four years.  You’re like, “I’m on another airplane.  Here’s another airport.  Here’s another airplane.”  I’m not knocking that – I mean, every time I’m in an airplane looking down at the ground, I’m like, “This is an amazing planet we live on.”  I definitely have that moment, but you can’t fight the feeling that, “Wow, I haven’t connected, like really connected, with someone in a long time.”

Does having success make those personal sacrifices worthwhile?

The thing about success is that you have to be careful about what you mark as success so that you’re not in this perpetual search for something that doesn’t exist.  Once you have a great show, and you get a great write up or a great review of something that you’ve done, and that kind of happens a few more times so it’s reinforced, you get the sense like, “Okay, I’m on the right track.  I should be doing this.  I feel like I’m good at this; I want to keep doing this because I love it.”  I’ve seen a lot of my friends, like, a lot of comedians, they’ll end up moving to L.A.  Recently there’s been a massive exodus to L.A., and I’m not a big L.A. fan.  I was just talking to my manager the other night, and I just see a lot of my friends being concerned about their careers.  To me, I can never be concerned about my career, and what that means is that if I’m concerned about my career, then what I’m doing is based off my career, of the idea of having a career.  It’s not my career; it’s my life.  And I don’t want to become concerned about my life all the time.  It’s like, I’m doing this for fun.  I love all my friends that I meet on the road – colleagues or whatever you want to call them, comrades.  We have this network of friendship, and we’re always making stupid jokes because that’s all we’ve done since we were kids.  That’s what it’s about.  All the other stuff, you know, the fame, or getting to be in a movie, or having your own sitcom, or writing for a late-night talk show – all that stuff, that’s just a part of the road of continuing that fun.  If you’re not having fun, and you’re like, “Oh shit, if I don’t get that gig, then I’m starting to make less money than I should be making,” you know, all that stuff, then what the fuck are you doing?

Then it becomes business.

*CLICK TO LISTEN* Yeah, it is a business, and you can’t just be oblivious to it, but know that if all of that was taken away, would you still be happy just sitting around with your friends telling jokes?  And that’s the major thing.  I’ve struggled long enough being a solo artist, whether it’s in music or comedy, I’ve struggled long enough, I’ve played in the shittiest places possible, I’ve slept in sleeping bags for long periods of time, and couches, and eaten nothing but Ramen, and swiped peanuts from stores because I was so poor, but after all of that, I still have my sense of humor.

***************************************************************************************************************************************************

Video: