Reggie Watts is an internationally renowned musician, comedian, composer, and performer recognized for his genre-blurring improvisations and visionary use of technology. Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1972 to a French mother and an African-American U.S. Air Force father, Watts grew up in Montana and began studying music at age five. He moved to Seattle in his teens to pursue jazz, quickly gaining recognition as frontman for the soul band Maktub and as an inventive collaborator in the city’s music and art scenes.
Watts’s signature solo sets fuse beatboxing, looping, gleeful absurdity, and philosophical musings—performed entirely live and often improvised. “When in doubt, zoom out,” he likes to say. Moving to New York in the 2000s, he became a recurrent presence on festival stages and in experimental comedy, eventually starring as the musical leader on IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang! and later as bandleader and announcer for CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden (2015–2023).
His memoir, Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again, reveals how his Montana “crew of lovable weirdos” and his experience growing up mixed-race shaped his distinctive worldview. “I guess, in a way, I grew up mixed race: half white, half Black. That question’s always been on my mind: ‘What are you? Are you this or that?’ In a strange way, music and comedy are kind of the same thing. I’m both. They’re just different modes of expression”.
A favorite on Netflix and comedy stages worldwide, Watts’s playful “disinformationist” style aims to delight and gently disorient audiences while inviting them to “pay attention to the world—it’s an amazing place. If you don’t, it’s whatever you think it is”. As he puts it: “The most important thing is to keep creating and following my inklings as they come into being and acting on them”