Mad Musical Genius Reggie Watts Delights In His New Netflix Special ‘Spatial’

Carpool karaoke has made James Corden a household name in America. But what of the true musical genius who rides shotgun with Corden, leading his Late Late Show band?

Reggie Watts keeps you on your toes in his first Netflix hour, Spatial. You don’t know what you’re seeing, and never know what to expect. A monologue. A dance number. An improvised sitcom scene. A rock song. Costume changes, set changes, and vocals all over the sheet music.

Watts introduces himself to the audience in waves, literally and figuratively.

Even the audience arrangement is kept off-balance, with some sitting on beanbags, others cross-legged on the floor. It may be a Los Angeles soundstage, but it might as well have been a slumber party, with the intimacy Watts encourages. He mocks the conventions of comedy, too, playfully so – with mentions of weddings and other compulsory nods to the audience you might expect, hope or suffer through at a comedy club, and a joke that Kevin Hart’s stadium-sized touring is no match for Watts and his “medium-sized room.” “He cannot do that…comfortably,” Watts cracks.

As clear as the all-caps words on Watts’s T-shirt – CHAOTIC GOOD – the comedian/musician’s mission is benevolent disruption. That’s at the heart of all comedy, the upending of your expectations, saying things you wished you could have thought of first, or if you had, then had the courage to say aloud, the misdirections and the inhibitions both.

Watts pulls all of this off with such a confident, almost nonchalant flourish, and has for more than a decade now. He won the Andy Kaufman Award in 2006, and his own comedy seems pulled from not only the likes of Kaufman, but also the vocal wizardry of Bobby McFerrin, the profundity of a TED Talk and the improvisational daring of Del Close.

His shows are singular. Even this hour, Spatial, despite a few song lyrics that may carry over from performance to performance, is otherwise wholly ad-libbed, the riffs magically leading somewhere and nowhere simultaneously. If you want to hear Watts explain how he makes his magic, you can listen to him here.

Or you can sit back and turn on the closed captioning and watch in amazement at how even the caption writer(s) find themselves stumped by Watts. Quoting him, never an exact science.

To wit, this sequence:

• [beatboxing] [music playing over speaker]
• [singing indistinctly]
• [scatting]
• [audience laughing]
• [grunts] [continues scatting]

At times, the closed captioning gives up entirely, suggesting that Watts truly defies description.

Just when you think it’s all just goofy gibberish, if you’re really paying attention, you catch moments or even minutes of philosophical questioning worth considering. Where did we come from? “Maybe we came from the clouds,” Watts offers. He certainly has. Just give him looper pedals and a microphone and let his let his voice run as wild as his billowing hair or his pinky fingernails, long and polished.

The scenes from his fictional sitcom, Crowe’s Nest, featuring friends and fellow collaborators in chaotic good comedy – Kate Berlant and Rory Scovel – are neither long nor polished. But they do play into the comedian’s unofficial motto.

“But the point is, we’re moving into the future and so this is an experimental show. Uh, you might not even see this on Netflix,” Watts says. “But this is an incubator R&D program designed to push the limits of what’s possible for a viewer to withstand.”

He’s kidding, of course. Or is he?

A moment of self-reflection about moving from Montana to Seattle when he was 18 wipes over to a scene of Watts fronting a grungy band, not quite what his actual band from the 1990s, Maktub sounded like, although it does feature Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age on guitar. Other songs Watts performs in full for the audience with his looper may start out as one idea before scatting and gibberishing into something else entirely. He might stop a song entirely just as you’re figuring out the melody. Or he may sing about the need to improvise your way through life with love, and trust that everything will turn out OK.

Because everything always does with Watts on the mic. Every stand-up comedy special might not end with a dance party, but not everyone is Watts. In fact, nobody is. It’s a singular hour from a singular performer.

It’s special. So Spatial.

[Watch Reggie Watts: Spatial on Netflix]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.