The baffling rise of the most harmless comedian alive.

It wasn’t long ago when most comedians shared the same game plan as Nate Bargatze. The 45-year-old stand-up veteran – whose latest Netflix special arrives on Christmas Eveand have one the holiday variety broadcast tonight on CBS-has dutifully steered clear of any pressures currently destroying American society. Unlike so many other comedians his age, Bargatze is fundamentally unengaged in the congealed rage over the trans debate, racial justice or “wokeness” writ large. Nor has he adopted the sour demeanor of the leftists who dominated the scene in the 2000s—guys like Patton Oswalt and David Cross who managed to shape every punchline into an indictment of George W. Bush.

Instead, Bargatze looks like an archetypal and mostly out-of-date nightclub comedian—the journeymen of the ’70s and ’80s who bounced from casino lounge to casino lounge with a winning demeanor and a joke book filled with airplane food. He does not touch anything topical and he never works blue. The impeccable cleanliness of his material almost comes across as fanatical – Bargatze is loathe to even use the verb sucks on stage, and the closest he has come to discussing his Christian upbringing is a story in which, as a preteen surrounded by piety and fear, he scolded his friends for watching Friday the 13th All this makes Bargatze a radical in his own right. In 2024, there is little commercial upside to quotidian comedy, especially when even milk toast Jerry Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais have enthusiastically joined the culture war. And yet Bargatze is somehow more famous than ever. Maybe there is a method to the gentleness?

The proof is in the pudding. Bargatze has been a comedian since 2002, and had carved out a reasonably successful life on the stage in his 30s. (By 2008, he used enough juice to book several appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.) But in the last three years, as his baby face began to fall away and his beard began to turn gray, Bargatze’s career began to skyrocket. Alongside Netflix, Bargatze has filmed scenes for Amazon and Comedy Central. And in a striking illustration of the social friction that has made stand-up a world so difficult to talk about, he lost a Grammy for Best Comedy Album to Louis CK in 2022. So it went over the past 14 months. nuclear. Above all, this had to do with Saturday Night Lives surprising choice to have Bargatze as one of its hosts in October 2023. (The fact that the actors were still on strike couldn’t have hurt.) And it especially had to do with a skit in which Bargatze played a Revolutionary War-era George Washington rallying his troops with a speech about what they were fighting for: their right to “choose our own weight and measurement systems.” The sketch was written by Mikey Day and co-head writer Streeter Seidell, but according to Day and Seidell, Bargatze immediately clocked his observational humor as in his lane. In an oral history of the sketch just two weeks later, Indiewire called it “The best SNL Sketch this year“, and it has been viewed on YouTube more than 16 million times. It was no surprise then when SNL invited Bargatze back again in October for an episode where his General Washington waxed rhapsodic about the absurdities of American English while crossing the Delaware.

None of this can be traced to the typical forces that create comedy stardom. He doesn’t host a hit podcast, nor does he have his own sitcom. (You won’t find Nateland at the top of the Spotify or Apple Podcasts lists, and his ABC pilot was never picked up.) Instead – slowly, without anyone noticing at first, Bargatze simply rose through the ranks in the old fashioned way; slinging piles of healthy material on his back-and-forth trips across America until the basketball arenas were packed to the gills with his fans.

There is precedent for this. Seam The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta noted in his 2021 profile of Bargatzethe man’s face is often compared to Jim Gaffigan’s — another comedian who reserves his righteous fury for Hot Pockets rather than, you know, the nomination of Kash Patel. I also want to highlight Brian Regan, another squeaky clean comic who is famous fight in the Mormon communityas a solid analog. But Bargatze has put his own spin on the tried-and-true PG-rated shtick. The Tennessee native speaks in a laconic ramble, assembling his setups and punchlines into an almost ASMR-like soliloquy on the back end. (Alberta characterized his acting as “comedy Xanax.”) In substance, Bargatze’s humor centers mostly on his own pervasive mediocrity as a husband, father, son, and American. Bargatze has joked about being unable to find a light switch in a hotel, forcing him to sleep under the nuclear heat of white light. He has believed that his only real strength he brings to his marriage is a willingness to do laundry, which he considers a breaking glass-in-emergency in any fight he and his wife might encounter. It isn’t smart, but it’s not brainless either. And I think that’s why Bargatze has earned high-profile cosigns from figures like John Mulaney and Bill Burr– two stand-ups who mine much more confrontational territory and who have nonetheless discovered genius in his wondrous everyday life.

It all makes you wonder if perhaps Bargatze has been a bit mercenary in the way he has cultivated his coalition. Had he set out to conquer the independent dollar? To put forth an act that can reliably play from sea to shining sea? The truth is that Bargatze once had more of an advantage. As he remembered in that Atlantic story, the comic once workshops an out-of-character joke about murdered sex workers in New York City, which he dropped after hearing from a woman in the sex industry who took offense. Bargatze internalized that feedback and has since smoothed out all the ghosts in his oeuvre. “I just have to be super careful with anything that could be seen as making fun of somebody,” he said. “I will never be evil.”

Of course, Bargatze’s neutrality is a politicized position in itself. His dogmatic avoidance of controversy may be celebrated in progressive circles, but it also renders his catalog unable to address any of the glaring frailties in American culture. Bargatze is certainly a smart enough guy to make a good joke about January 6 or the Facebook algorithm turning the brains of our aunts and uncles into bright green slime. But no, the comic would much rather talk about his McDonald’s order. There is dignity in this approach and perhaps a little cowardice as well.

Therein lies the irony of his rise. When Bargatze first caught on nationwide, we were entering the coma of the early Biden years. Americans had finally emerged from the era-defining divisiveness of Trump’s first ascension, holding out hope that the country might be on the verge of a well-deserved period of stasis. That optimism was dashed almost immediately. America has confirmed a dark social order, and I think that has recontextualized Bargatze’s popularity. In one of the most telling quotes from the Atlantic profile, Bargatze implores his audiences to “shut their brains off” for an hour while he’s on stage, giving way to the narcotic splendor of his carefully crafted but ultimately toothless comedy. It reminds me of how, since 2023, it has felt like the entire country has been sleepwalking toward disaster without the cultural mechanisms to articulate the moment. Well, now here we are, and Bargatze – relentlessly harmless, regardless of the stakes – is our notice. In that sense, perhaps his fame shouldn’t be so surprising in hindsight all.