Reggie Watts is getting into virtual reality. (Who isn’t?) But when you’re dealing with a polymath like him, it’s really more like virtual surreality. (Yes, I typed that. Sorry, not sorry.)

The musician-comic's VR project, *Waves—*cue the Kanye outrage!—is a head-trip about doing VR in VR and joining a cult. Really, that’s about as much of it as can be described in words. (At least words that currently exist.) There are also pretty colors. And Nathalie Emmanuel, aka Missandei on Game of Thrones, is in it. But none of that is what makes this important. What makes this important is Waves is one the first VR projects to offer a glimpse into what humor will look like in VR, where nuance is even more necessary than it is for comedy IRL.

Thankfully, the intrinsically distraction-free nature of the medium helps matters. There are no rowdy audience members; your roommate isn't talking over jokes you're trying to hear. “You can make offhanded comments, and you know that the viewer is going to experience it,” Watts says over brunch at the Sundance Film Festival. “I know I have the freedom to be as subtle as I want, and that actually only benefits the outcome.”

The outcome in the case of Waves, which mixes live-action and animation, is something that deploys deadpan humor in some remarkable ways. “The whole world we’ve created with Waves is so big and so over-the-top,” Emmanuel says, “that to have us be very calm about it is kind of funny.”

It's also something we haven't seen a lot of in virtual reality filmmaking, which—although there have have been comedy offerings—has tended to lean toward more sober fare.

courtesy of SUNDANCE INSTITUTE

The idea to mix big, bold visuals with slow, sly comedy originated, naturally, with weed. A few months back, VR startup Wevr was looking for new people to bring into the medium. It reached out to director Benjamin Dickinson about creating something, perhaps a music video, since he’d done those before. Dickinson didn’t think a straight-up video was the way to go, but figured it would be a good idea to bring on a musically-minded person. He contacted Watts, the current band leader of The Late Late Show with James Corden and a collaborator on his recent film Creative Control. They got stoned, got lunch, and started to brainstorm.

The first thing that we talked about that made us laugh hysterically was that once you get inside the VR piece you have to put another VR helmet on. That’s so dumb! director Benjamin Dickinson

They spent two hours at that lunch, with Dickinson’s phone recording the entire conversation. The director went home, transcribed the voice memo, and had something that could pass a working script. That meeting provided some of Waves’ best ideas and funniest gags. “I think the first thing that we talked about that made us laugh hysterically was that once you get inside the VR piece you have to put another VR helmet on,” Dickinson says. “That’s so dumb!”

Dumb, yes, but also smart. And Wevr needed them to get as weird as possible. The California startup, which hopes to be a player and platform for VR creators to share their work, wanted Watts and Dickinson’s project to push the limits of what its technology could do. “We had to have them push the creativity to the edge so that our technology could meet them there,” says Wevr co-founder Anthony Batt.

But meet them where, exactly? All this talk of cults and rainbows and deadpan jokes might make Waves sound like just a VR stunt. It’s not.

“The themes in Waves are actually serious ideas. Like destroying the god-head that we’ve been culturally programmed to worship is something that Reggie and I believe in and are actively trying to do,” Dickinson says. “But we just presented it in the dumbest fucking way possible.”