Why Nate Bargatze Became America’s Favorite Comedian

---

---

Featured: Nate Bargatze, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Patrice O’Neill, Louis C.K., Marc Maron, Jim Gaffigan, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien

What’s in This Episode

• Nate Bargatze’s rise to becoming America’s favorite comedian
• Nate’s early years in Chicago’s comedy scene at Second City and the Dugout
• Nate’s grind in New York City including barking for the Boston Comedy Club
• Marc Maron’s discovery of Nate at LaughFest 2012 and WTF podcast appearance
• Nate’s comedy festival wins and late night TV appearances with Fallon and Conan
• Nate’s Netflix and Amazon Prime special releases and commercial success
• Hello World becoming most-streamed original comedy special on Amazon Prime

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Saturdays this summer for deep dives on single topics. Helloo, I’m Johnny Mac and let’s start in Chicago. It’s two thousand and two. We are in a rat infested basement.

Aprighetzi’s there with his friend Michael Clay. They were meeter readers at a water company back home, and they decided they were going to become comedians. They moved to Chicago and rented a basement they nicknamed the Dugout, and they signed up for classes at Second City, you know, the improv factory that gave you Bill Murray Tina Fey half of every SNL cast for fifty years. Nate did it for a minute and figured out pretty quickly improv was not his thing. He switched over to a stand up program run by a guy named Jim Routh.

Nate did his first set in April of two thousand and three and started picking up scraps around Chicago and back home in Nashville. H my name’s Nate. It might be hard to understand me. And sometimes I come in New York City. I’m just going from Nashville.

I’ll wear this shirt for a couple of reasons. So if I get questions like that, they just they’re oh okay. If people come in late, they know they don’t have to interrupt us by asking. They’ll just read my shirt and they can’t figure that out. And they’re probably from Nashville too.

You’re probably have the same shirt. I also wear it in case I get lost people not wearing the sinem It’s kind of like a dog leash. I got my name to know where written in the back. This part of the story matters because it skips the aprighetsy creation, myth that he’s this wholesome Nashville guy. His dad’s a magician, he does clean comedy.

It skips the part where he actually came up in Chicago. He wasn’t a regional guy who got discovered. He went did the unglamorous thing the comedians do, which has moved somewhere else with a real comedy scene, and get humiliated in front of small rooms until something clicks. In two thousand and four, Nate moved to New York City. He got a job as a barker for the Boston Comedy Club, which is a club in New York City, which meant standing in Greenwich Village handing out flyers in exchange for stage time at night.

You ever see these guys, they’ll be like, hey, do you like stand up comedy? It is a rough gig. Nate was also driving for FedEx and walking dogs during the day to make the rent. But back in those days, the Boston Comedy Club was a real room. Dave Chappelle came through there, Bill Burr, Patrise, O’Neill, Louis C.K.

Nate has talked about watching those guys from the back, paying close attention to comedians who were not doing clean comedy, and he has said it took close to a year before he got his first actual paying gig in New York City. He described those early years as doing as many as seven sets a night, bouncing between rooms, which by his account, is too many. Nate will tell you five is the realistic ceiling before you stop being able to tell what you’re even saying anymore, Nate forgets. He stayed in New York City for almost nine years, nine years of the comedy seller the Stand Carolines. That’s where where he got the education, the place where he built the timing and the writing instincts that everybody now associates with effortless dad comedy, except none of it was effortless, and none of it happened in Nashville.

He built this in rooms that were dirty and rowdier than almost anything he had ever performed himself. And the interesting part is that people in the quote unquote mainstream comedy culture openly liked him, despite Nate being nothing like them. The detail that the dirty comics of that era genuinely loved Nate tells you that the cleanliness was never a defensive posture. It’s just who he was tested against an audience that had every incentive to expose him if he wasn’t real. Part of the discovery story I don’t hear about involves Mark Maren.

Maren saw Nate at a festival called LaughFest back in twenty twelve and tweeted about him and brought him on to WTF that same year. Mark Maren not exactly known for a wholesome sensibility, not exactly the Nashville demo, but Maren always had a sharp eye for who’s actually good underneath the surface presentation, and he clocked Nate almost immediately. That WTAF appearance did something specific for Nate’s career, put them in front of an audience of comedy people, the exact opposite of the casual audience had been known for, and that audience responded because the writing was that strong. I think I got a fascination with people that live in the South. I want them to h to set me straight on it and and and make me appreciate it as a place where a lot of different kind of people live, and not just the kind of people that are stereotypically Southern.

Yeah, we’re like the rest of the country, you are, except New York and LA the only ones that are different. Oh really, I think so. So we’re the assholes. I mean sort of like y’all Like New York always baffles me because they’re like they are like so small on America. Yeah, and they’re just like this is how it is, and this is how y’all are.

And I’m like, in your own state, their people are not like that, Like they’re your own Like they’re You’re only thirty miles away from hill people, yeah, like I mean very close. Yeah. And my people that I can go talk to and get out. Let’s go to upstate in the town. Of seven and they get it.

They get me. They I can go to Walmart and walk around and breathe and feel good about myself. Around that time, Jim Gaffigan was advocating for Nate, calling him one of the best up and comers in the business. Jimmy Fallon found him around the same time and put him on Late Night in twenty thirteen, then brought Nate onto something called the Clean Cut Comedy Tour, which Nate used that year to win both the New York and Boston Comedy Festivals. Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Nate by got it.

Thank you, Thank you everybody that was exciting, you know, it felt it felt good, all right. I’m from Tennessee originally. Yeah, so that’s something. And I lived in New York though for years. I’m on board in New York.

I like it. It’s I like the driving. It’s like great, It’s very intense. It’s everybody just honks it, everybody NonStop. And that’s how it should be everywhere, you know, like growing up in the South, no one honks their horn ever.

People just sit at lights and they’re just like, if you want to go, I totally understand. Conan had him on the Old TBS Show back in two thousand and eight and brought him back multiple times over the years. Very excited to be out here. Love getting to travel a bit. I’ve been through a lot of different countries lately, and it’s always weird because like every time I go to another country, I don’t never know where it’s at.

Uh, because I’m from Tennessee. I didn’t learn about countries in school. I learned about Tennessee. I learned about the states that touched us in case they attacked, and then I was told the rest was Europe and that’s where the gays were made. So by the time most casual audiences eventually discovered Nate through a Netflix special The Actual Comedy Folks Maren Gaffigan Vallan Conan other comedy Snobs You Me had already spent close to a decade quietly insisting he was one of the best pure writers working.

Twenty fourteen, yelled At by a Clown eight number two on the Billboard Comedy Charts. Full Time Magic followed in twenty fifteen, the title of that one a nod to his dad’s actual career as a working magician. In twenty nineteen, The Tennessee Kid, That’s the One a lot of the comedy nerds points to is the moment the writing fully arrived was now confident specific less about proving it could be clean and more about just being funny on his own terms. No Gimmick twenty twenty One’s the Greatest Average American on Netflix got made a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album. Then he switched teams twenty twenty three, Hello World went to Amazon Prime.

That became the most streamed original comedy special in Amazon’s history in its first twenty eight days.

And then there was Saturday Night Live.

Nay Brighetzi hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time on October twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, was the Halloween episode Season forty nine, Your Musical Guest, The Foo Fighters. His monologue ran long, the response strong enough that both Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly both wrote him up as a standout. He would come back and host again less than a year later October fifth, twenty twenty four, and season fifty Your Musical Guest Coldplay That tells us a lot. That’s Lord Michael’s making a specific bet that Nate brigets he could deliver ratings and a clean broadcast back to back. Of course, the famous moment is from the first appearance Washington’s Dream.

He plays George Washington walking his soldiers through an absurdly over complicated system of measurements, weights and measures. Sir, Yes, as I dream of that one day our proud nation will measure weights and pounds, and that two thousand pounds shall be called a ton, and what would one thousand pounds be called, sir nothing. That became one of the most clipped sketches of the season, and Vulture actually ran a piece asking if Nate had cracked the SNL code, whether his specific deadpan, patient’s style had found a way to work inside of a format that chews up most posts. Lord Michaels does not invite anyone back to host within a year. By accident that, in my opinion, was peak Nate.

Dennis starts to get a little rocky, not too bad, but a little old. There was the Emmy hosting gig. In twenty twenty six, CBS announced Nate as the host of the seventy seventh Emmis. The monologue leaned into a bit built around Nate’s reputation, the premise that he was terrified of offending anyone in a room full of famous, powerful people, using his clean image as the engine of the joke rather than working around it. Look at us, we’re doing it, all right.

Welcome to the seventy seventh Emmy Awards. You know, it’s not a big one like seventy five or eighty, but it’s the one that gave me. It’s an honor to be here tonight. I mean, I’m so excited to be here. Just all you guys have worked so hard to get here.

I mean. And it’s confusing too, because it’s just like we even McIntyre feel like I’m about the Grammys, Kate Lanchette feel like I’m aout the Oscars. Crazy Tina Fey. I thought like they should have had her host, you know why. A lot of people were wondering, like why am I hosted?

I I don’t know what that was, but all right, it counts as a laugh. It’s on paper. Maybe it worked in the room. People felt it ran out of gas before it found its second gear. The reviews afterward were not kind.

Award show hosting is chewed up funnier people and even more successful than David Letterman comes to mind under better circumstances, but it exposed something about the gap between his strength and the longer format. SNL gives him four minutes with a premise he can control, and Emmy’s monologue is fifteen plus minutes addressing a room that you know isn’t there for you.

---

And then Nate made a movie, an actual movie.

The Breadwinner hit theaters May twenty ninth, twenty twenty six. The pitch his wife, Mandy Moore’s character Lance a shark tank deal and now she he’s the one with the career and Nate’s stay at home dad bumbling around with the three daughters. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the movie. If you know Nate’s old deal, you know exactly what every scene looks like.

The reviews were not kind. Roger Ebertsite called it Burgatsley, which is pretty good.

---

And then there was the UFC event on the south lawn of the White House.

It was UFC Freedom two fifty, which was also part of the President’s eightieth birthday celebration. Nate was there. He’s a massive UFC fan, and while there he took a photo with Cheryl Hines and her husband RFK Junior. Cheryl posted a photo of the three of them together in the background. Jd Vance comments blew up on Nate’s Instagram.

People had seen him four times were swearing that they were done. W camal Bell wrote a whole substack about it. Some outlets started calling Nate Maga comedian Nate berghatsy and called him part of Team Fascism. His representative put out a statement saying Nate is not political, nor is anything he produces, and called him a huge UFC fan who just wanted to watch fights. All that brings us to Nateland.

In twenty twenty three, Nate launched Nateland Entertainment, not a touring brand, on a merch line and actual production company. The state ad mission is family friendly content across stand up, special sketches, scripted shows, podcast music, the whole apparatus.

---

And then he started to actually use it to actually build other comedians’ car…

He’s done great with that. Look at the Nateland roster. Dusty Slay, Aaron Webber who got a debut special produced by Nate Nateland, Nick Thune got one, Derek Stroop he was on Netflix, Julian McCullough, Joe Zimmerman, Lachlan Patterson, There was the Nateland podcast, Nateland at Sea, and actual cruise built around the brand. So while down in Austin, Tony Hinchcliff and Joe Rogan and Gang are doing one thing, Nate is building a quieter, more family oriented version of the same idea content company that gives emerging, clean leaning comedians, a real production budget, a real platform, and a real audience that already trusts the Nateland lame. So what do you do when you’re at the top of your game despite some minor stumbles in twenty twenty six, you start to think about walking away from it to open a theme park, an actual theme park on the site of Opryland, USA and Nashville that closed in nineteen ninety seven.

Nate plans to build the next great American theme park, a one hundred acre land named after himself. It will be called Nateland, he told the Wall Street Jourtle I’m the Mickey Mouse. The initial design for the park is divided into three sections based on Nate’s roots. Part of it will be Tennessee, part of it his journey to New York, and the rest He’s reach into the world beyond is as people magazine. Guests will enter through a nineteen ninety style mall.

The Tennessee themed land will have roller coasters at a donkey dive. The New York area will have street performers live shows at a ride through a simulated Times Square.

---

Meanwhile, the third section will have stunt performers and interactive shows.

Nate says, I’m in the ticket selling business. That’s all I’ve ever been in. That’s Daily Comedy News for Today, Back tomorrow with a regular episode.