It may be inauspicious to begin my editorial tenure with a dose of perceived nepotism, but Reggie Watts just won a major comedy award in Europe, is a brilliant comedian, and just happens to be a friend of mineâin fact, I'm in his apartment as I type this.
Watts won the first annual Oy! Oy! Award, in honor of the late Malcolm Hardee, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland. Hardee was an anarchic and revered British comic, famous for his outrageous performances onstage and off. He did impressions of Charles de Gaulle with his cock and balls, drove a tractor through a rival performer's show, stole a cabinet minister's Rolls-Royce, and ripped off Freddie Mercury's 40th birthday cake and donated it to an old-folks' home. He drowned in the Thames last February, apparently trying to get into his houseboat after a night of carousing. According to the inquest, police divers found the 55-year-old comedian at the bottom of the river, still clutching his bottle of beer: res ipsa 'jocular.'
A panel of critics and comedians juried the award, voting on which performer would have been Hardee's favorite.
"I think people thought it was a little weird that the first one went to an American," Watts said by phone from Scotland. "I wasn't expecting it at all."
He deserves it, of courseâWatts is a tremendously funny man. He and his trademark afro have fronted Maktub for years, but I've always thought the pop/rock band, however groovy, was too narrow for his surrealist gifts. In comic mode Watts tells bizarre storiesâabout pushing his grandfather off a mountaintop or stalking his girlfriendâwith disorienting warmth and sincerity, he improvises hilarious, layered songs with a sequencer and takes his audience down delightfully nonsensical tangents about the history of the curtsy or how he, a young black man from Montana, came to join the Nazi Youth.
"Really topical, specific humor is harder to do abroad," Watts said. "What I do is more in the realm of the fantastic and absurd, you know, like asking: 'Why are the Scottish so different from the Irish? Because the Scots drink a lot of water and the Irish won't stop walking.'"
Performers always come back from the Edinburgh festival with adventure stories. Watts told a few: meeting a young kilt maker who spent a year in a madhouse after eating too much LSD, and accompanying Seattle actor and musician Michael McQuilken (of Collaborator Productions) to the hospital after a Frisbee accident. "He reached up to catch it and cut his hand on a sign," Watts said. "He had to get a few stitches, but I think he can still play."
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In much, much sadder news: Great local playwright August Wilson has been diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. He recently premiered Radio Golf, the last of his 10-play cycle about African Americans in the 20th century.
