Reggie Watts, With Openers Casey Rocket, Simon Fraser, Cepeda Cheeks and Val Werner
Blue Whale Comedy Festival
Cain’s Ballroom
Tulsa
August 24, 2024
Reggie Watts tickled me first through YouTube. Clips of his specific brand of disorientation humor were going viral one after another in the early 2010s, and as the kind of neurotic, acid poetry-obsessed, alcoholism-adjacent college graduate that Watts makes his bread off of, I was instantly struck by the brilliance of his work. You can hardly call it stand-up: His is a brainy, free-association comedic act, which relies less on punchlines than on red herrings, the diversion as the point. Listeners are taken through a range of accents, registers, made-up songs, and stories with little or no punchline, simply for the fun of it.
At Watts’ Cain’s performance for the final night of the Blue Whale Comedy Festival, I was pleased to see how little had changed since those early days. His music and nonsense leapt from idea to idea, such that the audience received a gut-busting loss of reference. The whole act is based upon the playfulness and malleability of Watts’ voice; a wildly talented singer with a four-and-a-half octave vocal range, he channels everyone from Michael McDonald to Thom Yorke, often in the same phrase.
His set came after a frantic and hilarious featured performance by Casey Rocket, who made me laugh so hard and often that I cried. Rocket’s style is like a hit of cocaine: hard, fast and a little terrifying. A blend of non sequiturs and dark twists (out of nowhere: “There’s no good way to tell a child that their parents are dead … but there IS a very scary way”) kept us howling.
Watts’ style, which is by any definition manic, felt nearly tame in comparison. He took his time warming up his jokes, affecting a deep southern accent and reminiscing about his days on the crew for the Doobie Brothers in the ’70s, complete with an extremely fake story about coming through Tulsa during that time. Watts followed it up with an also fake “classic Tulsa song” about a series of restaurants and landmarks that were blissfully made up. The slow accumulation of fake facts and figures led to an incredibly funny overwhelm of absurdity.
My one criticism is that his “Go Get Some Robitussin” bit felt a step too far. Telling the audience quite literally, over and over, to go out and abuse accessible drugs? Likely it’s the moralist in me. I enjoyed far more his stories about the drug, and the hilarious escalation with which he prescribed the amounts (“Go get four ounces.… Go get two four-ounce bottles.… They sell them in eight-ounce bottles, go ahead and get two of them,” etc.), and less his insistence that the crowd go, tonight in fact, and buy it to try for themselves. I’m sure I’m stepping on the toes of surrealist comedy, which I’ve no doubt reserves the right to say whatever it wants. But it was the only part of Watts’ set that made me wonder who it was for, and what it would accomplish.
Overall, it was a wildly funny show, one certainly good enough to stand as the final show of the festival. Opening acts from Simon Fraser, Cepeda Cheeks and Val Werner (in addition to the fantastic feature from Rocket) were good choices, worked well with the crowd, and made us cough from laughter. Now if only the Walgreens weren’t sold out of Robitussin.
