Spatial
Netflix · 2016 · 61 min
An entirely improvised hour of loop pedals, nonsensical rants, and fake sitcoms.
Reggie Watts does not write jokes. If you watch Spatial expecting setups and punchlines, you will spend an hour watching a man crawl on all fours through an audience seated on beanbags, loop vocal tracks about Benadryl, and talk in a pitch-shifted, fast-forward squeak.\n\nFilmed live on a soundstage in Los Angeles, the hour represents the peak of Watts’ mainstream crossover era. At the time of taping, he had recently transitioned from IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang! to leading the house band on The Late Late Show with James Corden. Instead of standard observational comedy, Watts constructs an entirely improvised, surreal variety show. He jumps between mock lectures on intergalactic cargo, loop-pedal soul songs, and fully ad-libbed sitcom parodies. The sitcom segments, titled Crowe’s Nest, feature comedians Rory Scovel and Kate Berlant as roommates dealing with agonizingly awkward pauses on a bare-bones set.\n\nCritics generally appreciated the bizarre detour from standard stand-up structures, though audiences were expectedly divided. Some viewers found the total lack of formatting exhausting, while others welcomed a major streaming platform taking a chance on a chaotic, unscripted art experiment.
The set list
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Intergalactic emissary opening
Watts opens the show sonorously delivering a speech as a Darth Vader-esque cloaked figure discussing interstellar conflict and open vestibules before losing his train of thought and revealing a dancer.
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Audience crawl and quick story
Watts crawls over and under audience members before rolling onto stage to tell a 'quick story' at unintelligibly high speed.
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Crowe's Nest
A recurring parody of a bizarre, tense, improvised sitcom about on-edge housemates, co-starring Kate Berlant and Rory Scovel.
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Ghosts as temporal anomalies
A meandering riff on air flight that slides into confident pseudoscience asserting that ghosts are temporal anomalies intruding on our cybernetic portal reality.
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Tap dance duel
Watts invites an audience volunteer onstage and engages in a collaborative tap-dancing duel, mimicking her steps with beatboxed vocal rhythms.
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Bobby McFerrin-style finale and dance party
A layered, philosophical vocal love song ostensibly about apples that dismantles human jealousy and evolutionary desire, culminating in a striptease and a Don Cornelius-style dance party.
How it plays
- Tone
- Surreal, gleefully absurd, playful, post-modern, and unexpectedly philosophical.
- On stage
- A surreal, eccentric mad scientist delivering rambling academic lectures, rapid-fire digressions, vocal impressions, and deadpan absurdist musings, dressed in suspenders and a leather jacket over a 'chaotic good' shirt.
- Pace
- Erratic and deceptively chaotic; rapidly accelerates into unintelligible high-speed delivery, wanders into discursive looping monologues, and builds into high-energy polyphonic musical peaks.
- About
- space and intergalactic politics, the scientific explanation of ghosts, air travel, cannabis dispensaries and drugs, guns and Southern tropes, human relationships and jealousy
What the critics said
Widely praised by critics as an exhilarating, gleefully absurd deconstruction of stand-up comedy that successfully fuses virtuosic looped musical layers with deep philosophical musings beneath an exterior of apparent chaos.
In the room: Laid-back, intimate living-room atmosphere with spectators engaged in participatory improv, tap dancing, and a communal dance party.
Backstory
Staged on a custom Los Angeles soundstage configured like downtown Manhattan experimental theater with low living-room seating and rear bleachers to foster connection for an entirely improvised performance.
Details
- Released
- Taped
- Los Angeles soundstage
- Runtime
- 61 min
- Where
- Netflix
- Director
- Benjamin Dickinson
- Topics
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