The Mad Liberationist

Photo: Sandro; Styling by Tony Bryan; Training by Randy Wilder

Of all the challenges Conan O'Brien faces on his nationwide "Legally Prohibited From Existence Funny on Television" tour (translating his talk-show artful into a live comedy performance; fugitive coming off as a sore loser), the biggest claiming might be cocky-inflicted: having to step onstage every night in the wake of his opening human action, Reggie Watts. Watts, a star of New York's alt-one-act scene, is the kind of comedian who tends to close shows. His sets are loud, disorienting bouts of improvised anti-comedy. He is, in many ways, the opposite of O'Brien, every bit both a performer and a being. O'Brien is gangly and pale; Watts is chubby and dark. O'Brien has an ironic post–Tonight Evidence bristles and that signature fiddling flip of orange hair; Watts has a huge asymmetrical Afro that blends into a beard as thick and dark equally good-quality garden loam. O'Brien approaches comedy, famously, as a writer, spending hours preparing each moment onstage. Watts improvises his act and then thoroughly that, if a difficult-core fan were ever to request a favorite old bit, Watts would probably have no thought what he was talking about. Over the by seventeen years, Conan has established himself as one of America'southward almost stable comic voices. Watts builds his comedy out of radical instability: He switches and so fluidly amid unlike accents and personae (soprano, baritone, Californian, Cockney) that it'due south difficult to tell what the real person even sounds similar. Conan, in other words, is a recognizable type of comedian: a subspecies of the genus Letterman. Watts is like a grapheme Conan might have invented—half-human being, half-astral-funk Muppet.

Their partnership, nevertheless, is neatly symbiotic. Watts lends Conan underground credibility while Conan gives Watts national exposure—he'south probably the highest-profile opening act in the land right now. And it seems to be working out. Through its beginning month and a half, Conan'southward tour has drawn rave reviews, and Watts has inspired thousands of delightedly surprised testimonials on YouTube and Twitter. He embodies the paradox of the cult star: a charismatic, powerfully original performer who probably deserves to exist super-famous but whose originality disqualifies him from all the usual channels of super-fame. A beau comedian recently called him "Blackness Galifianakis," mainly because of his beard, only the analogousness goes deeper. Zach Galifianakis was also an anti-comedian revered among Brooklynites before he broke out nationally as a star of The Hangover and a host of Sat Nighttime Live. Equally the Conan tour nears its stop (it hits Radio Urban center Music Hall this week and finishes June 14 in Atlanta), we might exist witnessing the birth of Reggie Watts equally a national phenomenon: Galifianakis 2010.

I first saw Watts perform last March at MoMA—an unusual comedy venue, but appropriate for someone who pushes then hard against the traditional limits of the form. He was headlining a variety evidence in one of the museum'south modest subterranean theaters, and his xx-infinitesimal prepare contained every bit much variety as the residual of the acts combined. Its opening was unpromising: Watts walked onstage in a tight cherry T-shirt and suspenders and started bumbling, in a refined British emphasis that I took to exist his natural speaking voice, through some bad-mannered small talk. "We've come quite a chip of the way here already," he said, "and nosotros're merely getting started." He paused. "It's one of those years, yous know? And, uh, I call back a lot of us can feel—and agree—to most everything that nosotros're hither, within ourselves, tonight … " It took a few sentences to effigy out that this aimlessness was, in fact, the functioning itself. He was edifice, phrase by phrase, a structure of deliberately failed logic, with each slice related only enough to follow the terminal but not quite enough to make sense with the whole. It was gourmet word salad—a brilliantly sustained comedy delay. Gradually the crowd adapted, and Watts'southward pauses filled with increasing laughter. "Nosotros, more than than any other time," he connected, "and I mean this when I say this—more than than whatsoever other time, we've been here, right now. You lot know?" He spoke, haltingly, about polycarbonates and the landfill system, cited fake authorities ("French and Saunders once said … "), referred to the MoMA equally the Whitney, and snuck in, out of nowhere, a near-perfect impression of Bill Cosby. Occasionally, with a straight face, he'd substitute a bizarre series of noises for a word, or his vox would cutting in and out while his oral fissure kept moving, so it looked like the microphone was malfunctioning. Information technology was similar a seminar on public speaking gone wrong. Presently the oversupply had fully acclimated, and Watts was officially killing.

The cool monologuing was an act in itself, and most comedians would have stopped at that place. Only Watts took things to another level. Several times during the fix he broke into music—creating songs, layer by layer, using only his vocalism and a little automobile chosen a loop pedal. He beat out-boxed, hummed, clicked, sang, and rapped; he mixed rock, hip-hop, techno, opera, Broadway, church hymns, and soul. The nonsensical talking blended into the music, and the music composite dorsum into the talking, with no connective thread other than that it all seemed to be emanating from the mouth hole at the approximate center of Watts's wild halo of hair. He looked, at times, like someone suffering a seizure from an overflow of incompatible talents. By the end of his set, he was doing whatever is amend than killing—double-homiciding, mass-murdering.

Watts, in 2008, performing in Tennessee. Photograph: Rob Loud/Getty Images

For the tape, Watts's natural speaking voice is pure neutral delocated middle-form American—a little higher than I expected, a little nasal. "I think that when people seek any form of self-education," he told me, "their accent merely kind of neutralizes. Information technology gets closer to a newscaster." We were speaking in his manager's office in the Village, the week earlier he left on the Conan tour. He wore blue-and-red-striped suspenders, a greyness T-shirt that read Artistic Uppercase, and black jeans rolled upwards at the ankles. His mustache curled up inexplicably on one side. Each of his pinkie nails was long and painted—one pinkish, the other black.

I asked Watts how many different accents and personae he has. He said he'southward not sure; information technology's an unstable crew. But he estimated that he'southward spent half his life speaking in a British emphasis, of which he has four or five main variations. Then, without prompting, he started to demonstrate them. (Talking with Watts is like watching a mellow version of his stage show.) There was an educated Londoner ("very kind of subtle"), a thick, sludgy working-class voice ("you're trying to sympathise the properties of cheese, y'all want to put information technology on your biscuits"), a hyper Cockney ("let's get out like for a pint or wha'ever, take hold of some o' them birds, y'know what I mean, we could talk forevah about these birds"). He also has what he calls "European in general," plus deliberately terrible Irish gaelic and Australian accents, sci-fi robots, a range of feminine voices, and a whole crowd of Americans: New Jersey cabbies, effeminate southern men, his granddad from Cleveland. "They just kind of pop into my caput," he said. "It merely happens. Sometimes I'll exist channeling a voice that I heard on the subway. Some of information technology'southward just based on types of people, lifestyles. I don't really practice at all. I'm e'er riffing throughout the mean solar day, cracking jokes with friends. I kind of fall into it."

All of a sudden he started speaking like a W Coast Wiccan daughter, in a voice that oozed patchouli and druid crystals. "You know like the spirit world is so crazy?" he said. "Because Gaia is similar a full-being sentience? And we are the stewards of it? And Shilanqua was talking to me yesterday well-nigh the fire and our responsibilities to make clean up after we've been in camp? And base camp was 30 feet away and Trinity was similar, 'How come up you didn't bother to come to the morning temple ritual?' " And on and on and on and on.

Reggie Watts's childhood seems to have been engineered to produce a comedian exactly like Reggie Watts. He was born in Germany, in 1972, to a French female parent and an African-American male parent. His mother spoke piffling English language, then Watts grew up fluent in French. Past age iv he'd also lived in Spain and Italy—his dad was in the Ground forces—which ways his brain's linguistic communication centers got exposed, at a crucial flow, to most of the accents of Europe. (Onstage, he'll occasionally launch into braided streams of French, Spanish, German language, and Italian.) He spent the rest of his childhood in Groovy Falls, Montana, a place that must take seemed exotic in its mundanity. At 5 he started studying classical piano, adding yet some other language—music—to his repertoire. (He studied jazz in college, and has played with several rock bands, opening for Regina Spektor, Dave Matthews Band, and the Rolling Stones.)

Because of his childhood culture-hopping, Watts says, he grew up with anthropological tendencies. He didn't and so much inhabit the world every bit written report it. "I e'er tried to find the causality of why things are the fashion they are," he told me. At habitation he'd accept his toys apart. At school he'd invent backstories to explain why bullies were then mean, or he'd bulldoze his teachers crazy by interrogating them about why they had go teachers. He became a connoisseur of what he calls "in-between" moments—times when he was immersed in a state of affairs only could also come across it from the outside. Despite his familiarity with music, for instance, he found himself looking around in wonder during schoolhouse orchestra exercise. "Here I am in second violin section—the conductor getting up and tapping the baton," he said. "And all these people with horsehaired wooden sticks and strings, looking at a bunch of symbols on a piece of paper. And the bass players are tall and look similar their instruments, and the cellists have long hair and look like cellists. I'm sitting at that place like, What is this?"

Watts always felt not of this world. "For most of my life I've liked to pretend I live in a starship. Punching in fake codes to get into doorways that plainly are not secure." (He makes some sci-fi door noises: Bee exercise practice deep. Psshhhh.) "I honey that idea of living on a spaceship. Because essentially we are: a gigantic thing floating in some infinite darkness that'due south running on principles that nosotros don't fifty-fifty understand."

Onstage, Watts likes to make fun of observational comedy. He'll slip into a low, drawling, American phonation and say things like: "Women be crazy … Now hither's a scenario. A woman be, like, sittin' down in the chair and shit? You know what I'grand saying? And she might, like, get up at some point, yous know? And walk out a door and some shit?" Long break. "Know what I'1000 sayin'? That'due south fucked up."

But Watts's own comedy is actually—in a unique way—hyperobservational. He notices things, the more trivial the better, and plays them for improbable laughs. Information technology's less a stand up-up deed than a public report on his decades-long ethnographic study of human behavior. "I like talking almost mechanisms," he told me. "Because information technology's kind of cool. It's not trying to be noticed, it's trying to exist transparent." He wrings a lot of humor, for instance, out of the way performers adjust their microphones. He'll pick 1 up and beginning untwirling the cord from the mike stand up, and so he'll keep doing information technology for twenty seconds, exaggerating the motion until it turns into its own little dance. Or he'll sit down at a piano and, before singing, autumn into an near Chaplinesque struggle with his mike stand'due south tension knobs. He recently got onstage after a string of more-traditional stand-up comedians and performed a silent gear up—moving his lips, mimicking the gestures and rhythms of stand-up, fifty-fifty pausing between silent jokes to wait for the crowd to laugh.

Compared to his topical contemporaries', Watts'south one-act can seem purely absurd, derived from the globe but non of the world. It'due south similar Richard Pryor with the human content surgically extracted. Only Watts's nonsense actually makes a foreign kind of social sense; his incongruity is congruent with the development of American culture over the past ten years. Information technology'south comedy for the Internet era: this infinite fracture that forces us to be fluent in a one thousand thousand discourses, and to speak them one on top of another. Watts parodies that, dropping u.s. in and out of discussions already in progress, never relating or resolving them—showing us all what we've done to logic, and how silly it is. He treats knowledge wiki style, feeding the audition false information, as when he recently told a oversupply in Seattle that the Space Needle was built in 1993. He assumes a ridiculous intimacy with audiences, talking to them as if they've grown upwardly with him: "Practice you guys retrieve when we went on that field trip … Remember when Brian got in trouble?"

Watts described his method to me every bit "civilisation sampling." He picks templates, he says—a scientific lecture, a corporate report, hipster gossip—and so fills them out, off the superlative of his head, like Mad Libs. When I asked if he'd ever considered writing material in accelerate, he basically recoiled. "No. That would suck." He talks about the process of improv in quasi-mystical terms, as a kind of spiritual jazz—a manner to accolade the globe through mindfulness. All his ideas come, he says, from being alert to his environs and opening his mind to something he refers to equally "the Source."

"Improvising music has helped me a lot," he said. "Music is very similar to one-act: It's all near texture, timing, context, vocabulary, performance. When someone's onstage doing a solo, substantially it's the aforementioned thing as what a comedian does. They're in the moment. They're listening. The surroundings is giving you stuff constantly: a adult female yelling something, an animal making a weird audio in the wood, a window being rolled up, static on a radio. Someone turns to yous and says something in the aforementioned key as the radio. If yous pay attending to the earth, information technology's an amazing place. If yous don't, it's whatever you think it is." Equally the world will presumably detect, now that information technology's beginning to pay attention to Reggie Watts.

The Mad Liberationist