🎧 Nate Bargatze is About to Face His Toughest Audience
America’s best-selling touring comic is about to trade arenas (but not personality) for one night on the Emmys stage: ‘I’ve got to do just me’
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Nate Bargatze doesn’t want anyone to ever feel uncomfortable at one of his shows. As the best-selling touring comedian of the past year, the 46-year-old stand-up has built an empire on clean comedy that doesn’t feel stuffy or stilted, making fun of family life (usually at his own expense) in a way that feels effortlessly relatable. But now that he’s proven he can sell out arenas across the country, he’s preparing to face a much smaller but way more challenging audience: the Emmys-going crowd inside L.A.’s Peacock Theater.
“I’ve got to do just me in that world,” Bargatze tells me when I ask him, on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, how he’s preparing to host the Sept. 15 ceremony. By then, he may already be an Emmy winner himself: Bargatze is nominated at the Creative Arts Emmys, given out the week before the primetime broadcast, for both writing and variety special for the Netflix release Your Friend, Nate Bargatze. The success of the special is proof that Bargatze is a superstar, but he’s modest about how he’ll bring that appeal to the Emmys stage.
“I’m not making them come to me like I’m anybody special,” he insists. “But I will definitely do what I do and try to get them into that rhythm, just because that’s my best chance of making the show great.”
With his own successful podcast network, Nateland, and his wildly successful stand-up career, Bargatze is exactly the kind of talent who doesn’t necessarily need traditional Hollywood outlets to reach his audience. But as we discuss in depth on the podcast, he’s still eager to explore those more conventional routes of stardom — for example, he’s just finished production on his first leading film role in The Breadwinner, which will be released in theaters by Sony next spring.
“I was someone who started standup before YouTube,” Bargatze tells me as he explains his ambivalent relationship to the creator economy. “I remember putting my videos on YouTube, and we couldn’t really fathom what YouTube was gonna be. So I still like the traditional route. We have so many choices now, I think it’s overwhelming, so I feel like you’re gonna eventually just winnow down to kind of back to what TV was. I still love this system of Hollywood and the traditional route of the way they did it — I still think that can get done and that should be done.”
Hear much more from Bargatze, including what he learned from bombing in front of audiences in his early years as a stand-up and why the man born and raised in Tennessee never got rid of his Southern accent, on today’s special bonus episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. To watch the video version of our conversation and see the jerseys hanging on Bargatze’s wall and why he has them, join Prestige Junkie After Party, where just $5 a month gets you access to video podcasts, bonus episodes, call-in shows (like the one I’m planning for next week; get your questions ready!) and so much more.
