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with enormous amber rings dripping like tree sap from his fingers, his Afro a Miracle-Gro spider plant. Sometimes he's painted a pinkie nail pink. He might be wearing a ridiculous sweater.

Then he lays down a track. He starts with the sound of a kick drum, from deep in his throat, recorded into a loop sampler -- a small machine often used by guitarists to layer melodies. He adds a snare with a few controlled exhales. A couple of high notes with his tongue against his teeth. And then he starts to sing, in French or gibberish German. Morphing imperceptibly into a cockney slang, he seems to be talking about something from a human-resources manual or a dating disaster. Or whatever else comes to mind.

He calls it "ambient comedy," with the same hint of rosy irony that characterizes much of his work. Improvised, absurdist stand-up comedy, with a direction that even he doesn't know, because he rarely prepares.

One song that began as improvised material now regularly ends the show. "Fuck Shit Stack," a minutes-long string of expletives over a beat, shifts into a cogent deconstruction of materialism and sexism. "I like women. I like the concept of a woman. I like to take that concept and reduce it to an object." Then into a critique of the facsimile of a facsimile that gangsta rap has become. "It's a stack of fuck shit, on top of itself."

The thirty-six-year-old's bio reads like a Hemingway novel. Reginald Lucien Frank Roger Watts was born to a French mother and a U. S. Air Force officer stationed in Germany. The family lived briefly in Spain before relocating to Great Falls, Montana. He plays the piano, synthesizer, and violin and has a four-and-a-half-octave vocal range. He's performed with Black Eyed Peas and Regina Spektor. Yet what he might be best known for, among the YouTube set, anyway, is a soulful tune called "What About Blowjobs."

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You could call him a sonic Salvador Dalí. Or the beat-boxing love child of John Cage and T. S. Eliot, with the parenthetical ramblings of David Foster Wallace. But what Reggie Watts does is not Orwellian, Shakespearean, or Kafkaesque (though he does those guys well). It's Wattsian. And when all else fails, he does a killer Bill Cosby.

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