Reggie Watts On The Weird New Age Of Comedy

Reggie Watts and the diverse, digital and beautifully weird new age of comedy.

- Brian Heater

“We here at Netflix believe: Fuck TV,” Reggie Watts tells the crowd with a smile. “We’re moving into the future. This is an experimental show. You might not even see this on Netflix. This is an incubator R&D program designed to test the limits of what a viewer can stand.”

Those who know the comedian from his stream-of-consciousness stand-up, his meta-hysterical TED Talk or his bandleader gig on The Late Late Show will tell you that this moment, from his new special, is just Reggie being Reggie. But no matter how far out there he gets, Watts always has a point, and that Netflix line is no exception. The past few years have found the streaming service drastically increasing its output of original stand-up specials— testing the limits of how much stand-up a viewer can stand. Clearly we haven’t hit one yet.

Watts’s special, Spatial, is his latest entry in what The Wall Street Journal has called “the new comedy economy,” a recent surge in the form’s evolution led by a handful of streaming services. In August, Netflix announced Watts’s special along with seven others, from bigwigs including Dana Carvey and Cedric the Entertainer to fresh faces like Michael Che.

To date, Netflix has produced 43 of its own comedy specials—19 this year alone. Nearly triple that number of non-Netflix-produced specials are currently available for streaming through the U.S. version of the service. Meanwhile, Comedy Dynamics, the country’s largest independent stand-up comedy producer, has seen its own number jump several times in the past few years, from seven specials in 2006 to 51 in 2016.