Reggie Watts is a man of many trades — comedian, singer, musician, beatboxer, and James Corden’s eccentrically charming bandleader on The Late Late Show. But if there’s one thing he really, really wants people to stop acknowledging, it’s his hair. His voluminously large and untamed afro, to be precise.
“What’s going on with the hair? Where’d you get it? People ask about it,” he told the intimate crowd at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday evening. “To a certain level I understand people are curious over how it gets there. What do you do? Can I touch your hair? No. It’s a fascination. Most people just let their hair grow out and don’t really fuck with it too much and have real weird looking hair, like a crazy cave person or wizard or whatever you want to call it. Or a sage, in this case.”
The worst thing about his distinctive ’do, he continued, is when people get a little too touchy-feely without his consent. “Usually when someone gets drunk, and usually it’s a woman, they’ll just reach out and touch and grab it,” he said. And though Watts doesn’t immediately respond with “What the fuck? Hey woman!” he does consider responding in kind. “I should reach out and touch their hair. ‘Hey, you did it to me!’ But it’s not the same. It’s so terrible. Sometimes it really catches me off guard. I’ll be having a conversation with somebody, and suddenly it’ll be like, haaaaaaaaaiiirr. I usually try to take it with a grain of saffron.”
There is one thing that would entice him to chop off and donate his ample locks, though. “I would say some kind of organization that did hands-on encouragement for kids in disadvantaged places, and in advantaged places too, to really focus on the arts and sciences,” he said. “Those to me, science and art, are the most important things in the world.”
Your move, Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
