This is one of 500 podcasts from Comedianscomedian.commodion.com.

Hello there and welcome back to the show. Today I'm talking to Reggie Watts, but this is a pretty

special episode of the show, not just because Reggie Watts is a comic and musical and creative genius,

but because this is episode 500 in, I suppose the polite, the British thing to do would be to talk about that afterwards.

So I'll tell you more about what it means to me that this is the 500th episode of this podcast

after we do all the Reggie stuff. How's about that?

So that was incidentally, thank you, Kim Belukovic for the original

voice of the, this is a podcast from Comedianscommodian.combeian. Person, my old housemate and dear

friend Kim. So thank you very much to her. And let's get stuck in. Reggie Watts is born in Germany,

raised in Montana, as you can find out all about his early

life in his incredible book, which we'll shout out later on as well, and currently residing,

I believe, in Los Angeles. He is genuinely a one-of-a-kind performer. And when I first saw him

live at South by Southwest a few years ago, as I almost certainly

will say to him in the beginning of this interview, I felt like my brain was melting out from

between my ears because I just didn't know what he does is a thing that anyone could do.

Comedy is a broad church and he occupies sort of seemingly the entire

breadth of it. His work sits on the fault line, I would say, between music and comedy using loop

pedals, his voice and an enormous amount of imagination, creating a show that is literally

unique every night. And lots of people think that's how comedy works, but it really isn't in all but very few cases. We're going to talk about being

band leader on the late late show with James Corden. We'll talk about featuring on Comedy Bang Bang

in the TV show. We'll talk about his sold-out worldwide tours or DJing the Emmys. He's done so much and his career has been completely defined by doing things his own way. So in the first half, we'll talk about how television struggles with what to do with improvisers. We'll talk about why to, no two Reggie Watts shows are ever the same. We'll talk about avoiding overthinking creativity and why smaller teams make braver work.

So we'll get into all of that in just a second. As we celebrate episode 500, there has never been a better time to support this independently produced podcast.

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