Both my parents loved music, and my dad loved jazz and soul, and my mom loved soul and some European folk music and stuff like that. I think when I was pretty young, I showed musical inclination. They wanted me to find something to better myself, for sure.
Watts: I think they wanted me to get an education. Watson: How obvious was it that you were going to do comedy? If I had talked to your parents when you were in junior high, high school, were they, “Here’s what young Reggie’s going to do”? I can be a happy-go-lucky guy that wants to make friends with people, but coming from that, it’s like, wow. There’s just a lot of our living, survivalist stuff going on that, maybe, I think I’m pretty thankful for inheriting. Then most of the family is military police. Then my mom coming from France and coming from the north of France that got German occupation and then her aunt going to Auschwitz and getting moved around to five different concentration camps.
My whole family, whether it’s that, my dad’s dad running the numbers. The two lovers that he was cheating on my grandma with killed him. My whole family : My dad’s dad ran the numbers in Cleveland and died from two lovers finding him. But then she would just get up in their face and basically threaten to physically harm them. They would call her a nigger-lover or whatever. ” I’m the guy trying to calmly disarm the situation before it gets worse.īut I remember the guys used to spit on her because she was dating my dad or whatever. It’s insane sometimes, I get like, “Please don’t.” I’m trying to mitigate someone offending her by like, “Oh, we’ll. If she feels that someone’s being disrespectful or anything. She still to this day, she’s still that same person. I liked being different, but I just made friends with people and that usually saved me a lot of hassle. But at least when I was growing up, and because of my mom being white obviously, I think people around there were like, “Oh, she just stood her ground and she just let us know how she feels therefore, we’re not going to mess with these people anymore.” Then I just became a very likable kid and all the kids liked me and their parents thought I was fine. I definitely had a couple of bouts of racism, just neighbors telling me to get off their property and calling me the N-word and stuff like that.īut when my mom heard about it, she called the police and the police came over, and they had to come across the street and apologize to me and it was like, “Wow, Montana’s supposed to be kind of like Mississippi or something like that or Alabama”. I mean, I remember him being in good spirits and we had friends over, other Air Force buddies and stuff like that. So he was already kind of a quiet guy, and so it was a little bit tough I think for him, but he figured out a way.
#REGGIE WATTS HOW TO#
They didn’t know how to talk to him and he was a war vet, went to Vietnam twice. She just kind of noticed that there were people like him just not communicating with him. My mom’s very protective over the way people treat my dad or myself, and so she was very fierce and got into people’s faces a lot. So, he’d experienced the European version of that with my mom and then dealing with it in other ways when they moved to different places.īut then when we made our final move in 1976 to Montana, there was definitely. just because of more integration with African culture. Europe wasn’t as bad as the United States. “I’m Jim Charles, but some people call me Charlie.” Wink, wink. But when we came to Montana, I mean, obviously he chose my mom, who’s white and French, and met her in the north of France, at a bar called the Charlie Bar - and his name is Charles Watts. So being in the Army, with transferring to the Air Force. We moved there in 1976, and my dad obviously dealt with racism in all its presentations being in Vietnam and coming from Cleveland and Shaker Heights. What was it like in general? And then obviously, being Black in Montana - what was that like? Straight Outta MontanaĬarlos Watson: So now Montana is one of the few states I haven’t been to.
#REGGIE WATTS FULL#
You can find excerpts below or listen to the full interview on the show’s podcast feed. When he stopped by The Carlos Watson Show, we were all ears. If you have to be an “accidental” something, much better to be an accidental comedian than an accidental homicide, and so it is that the German-born Reggie Watts, a musician by “trade,” ended up figuring out that getting people to laugh at his songs was a whole hell of a lot easier than getting them to listen to them.
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