Reggie Watts
Reggie Watts is an actor, born 1972.
Nothing in a Reggie Watts set is written down. He builds the whole thing live from a microphone, a keyboard and a looping station: a beatbox laid down first, then a bassline, then a vocal in whatever accent has occurred to him, until a full song is running underneath a monologue that may be about nothing at all. He calls himself a disinformationist, and the stated aim is to disorient an audience rather than deliver punchlines to it.
That is an awkward skill set for television, and television has largely solved the problem by hiring him to be himself. He was the house musician on Comedy Bang! Bang!, where the fake-talk-show frame gave the improvisation something to bounce off, then led the band on The Late Late Show with James Corden from 2015 to 2023, an eight-year stretch in a job that mostly rewards reliability. He turns up as himself on Conan, on Celebrity Jeopardy!, on After Midnight, and in the documentary Have a Good Trip.
The character work is a smaller but consistent second stream, almost all of it animated: Pastry Pete on Tuca & Bertie, Quay on The Great North, the Chancellor in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, Hoss in Extinct, Carl in Duck Duck Goose, and a set of invented creatures on HarmonQuest, a show whose entire premise is improvisation, which was always going to suit him.
Movies (6)
TV (11)
Where to start with Reggie Watts
The place to start is Comedy Bang! Bang!, because it is the credit actually designed around what he does. The show is a talk-show parody with no interest in staying on script, and Watts is positioned as the one-man band who can absorb whatever a sketch throws at him and score it in real time.
After that, The Late Late Show with James Corden for the long professional stretch, and HarmonQuest if you want him improvising inside somebody else's improvisation, which is the nearest thing on television to his live act.
The animation is a different pleasure. Tuca & Bertie is the best-written of them and Pastry Pete is a wonderfully oily creation, The Great North is warmer and more family-friendly, and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is the one your kids will pick. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics is the outlier, a documentary where he shows up as himself and is very funny about it.