Better Nate Than Clever
If you answered “yes” and like Walmart commercials in the middle of your big-screen comedies, ‘The Breadwinner’ is for you
Nate Bargatze is not a dumb guy. He just plays one on TV. And, of course, onstage in his act, in which the 47-year-old comedian from Old Hickory, Tennessee, adopts the persona of a middle-aged everyschlub befuddled by modern life and expectations of basic competence. You know this veteran comic is not a dim bulb — nobody doggedly builds a stand-up career that takes them from clubs to theaters to selling out arena tours from a foundation of genuine stupidity. But you do get the sense that guy with the Southern drawl talking about his confusion over Starbucks orders and his daughter’s common-core math lessons isn’t that far from the IRL version. And because Bargatze is usually the butt of his own jokes, his mix of aw-shucks relatability and self-deprecation goes down nice ‘n’ easy. An article once compared his observational comedy to “Xanax chased by a cool glass of iced tea.” Even that description sounds too edgy.
For early adopters who caught his specials before his 2023 SNL hosting-gig bump — we highly recommend you check out 2019’s The Tennessee Kid, which is still the best showcase for his slow-release timing — seeing Bargatze become the alpha dog of beta-male stand-up acts feels like justice has been served. It’s not just that his act is family-friendly, or that he’s offering neutral-ground escapism from our divisive world (“There’s plenty of times you’re going to be fighting,” he told the New York Times, “so I can be the one hour you don’t fight”). It’s that the dude is that freakin’ good. His sense of crafting anecdotes into top-tier material and knowing how to use his sweet-molasses pacing to calmly detonate a joke is damn near peerless.
