Watching Reggie Watts vocally stack up a track (not Fuck Shit Stack up a track, mind you), starting with the kick drum, moving through the hi-hat and on to the grinding bass, its clear why thumbs are kept off mobiles and blottoed bachelorettes remain silent throughout the Seattle-based comic’s sets. The brain can’t compute how that much improvisational beatboxing talent and that much funny fit into one lone body. Not even the B-side Nine Inch Nails playing through the PA pre-show could tamp down the exuberance of a full house at Mayne Stage Friday night, and Watts walked out for the 8 o’clock set to a welcoming barrage of cheers. Between musical numbers, Watts’ stand-up can be a bit like being cornered at Thanksgiving by an uncle with ADHD: “You know Keith, yeah, uh, Keith’s a little bit of an asshole. He’s got a tiny little asshole. I don’t know personally, but his doctor says...I did a cal-cu-fu-lation and if we use 2.3 less electricity, we can save the world.” Non-sequitors abound, landing in large part because the face beneath the gargantuan afro is so earnest.
Although his sets tend to be light on the crowd work, references to Chicago drew in folks early, including one circuitous story that starts with the largely middle-aged white audience all “clearly being from Chicago’s South Side,” having supported a community center named “Miracles” which is home to “break dancers, pop-and-lock-ers and mimes and shit” and that the point is you have to remember that lives continue past the end credits of a movie. It’s a bewildering ride at times to follow the narrative thread, but it always ends up in a cul-de-sac of beatboxing genius, as here with an extemporaneous tune Watts described as being quintessentially Chicago, you know, “1942, windy as fuck, and a lotta people wearin’ hats.” A cymbal-riding, back-beat, Munsters-like swing tune, the lyrics begin “There’s a ghost in your house and you don’t know what to do...” and the crowd goes absolutely mental as Watts begins a Temptations-style hip-swing, looking as sincere as an auditionee.
A southern accent and revisionist Lewis & Clark biography later, Watts is at the Ferrari red Nord Electro 2 keyboard, delicately conducting his own intro to the “vibrator vs. dildo” song, which begins with a voice lifted straight from a new age meditation album, invoking “Gaia.” A sharp left turn takes us into a southern trucker ballad which culminates in a Journey-like barn-burner of a hook, “Baby, I believe in your tits!” Yeah, it’s a little high school, but it’s the fast-paced vocal interjections that kill, such as “If I were to be with that person 30 years from now those big tits would be a problem...because reality’s a bitch.”
The highlight of the evening came with a bit of fabricated autobiography. “So, I was on the road with the Oak Ridge Boys.” The room explodes, topped only by the comparison of his Oak Ridge Boys to Radiohead: “They have a singer that can sing perfectly fine, but he chooses to sing in a injured fashion.” One gets the impression that as an innovator, Watts must actually be a Radiohead fan, but the improvised, Kid A-style number which follows is as good a Thom Yorke deconstruction as I’ve seen. Spitting out an irregular, skittering beat into his Line 6 DL4 Stompbox Delay Modeler, Watts reached up for Yorke’s falsetto, scratching at the mic for full Johnny Greenwood experimental effect. Even Yorke’s finger grazing of the back of his neck as he sings was on display to the delight of the Mayne Stage audience.
Watching a comic not just kill, but enrapture a room for the entirety of a set is extraordinary and the crowd let Reggie know as much, whooping and cheering. Naturally these claps and woots were sampled into a hook for his last tune, one in which the vocals disappear and reappear behind ever-moving lips, take on the intonation and cadence of Bill Cosby for a spell, and then crash to a halt, hurling the audience forward in an instant standing ovation.
- Doyle Armbrust
published in the Time Out Chicago Unscripted Blog on August 15th, 2011