- Content: Why Family Man Nate Bargatze Keeps His Comedy Clean
By Movieguide® Contributor
While most standup comedians rely on raunchy material as the backbone of their shows, Nate Bargatze has made a name for himself off of clean content. Bargatze is also known as ‘the nicest man in comedy.’
“I think it’s always been just trying to be a nice person,” Bargatze told NPR Illinois. “I’m not a perfect person by any means. Being nice is very easy. I always say, it’s the easiest thing you can do. I think it can take you the farthest in any career, just be a nice person, just because you want people to want to be around you.”
Being nice also draws in nice people. Bargatze loves going to his shows and meeting with his fans because his fanbase is full of people that are as kind as he is. His family-friendly humor has brought together a family-friendly crowd.
A large influence of Bargatze’s style is the comedian Brian Regan, who Bargatze first heard in his early twenties. Regan also keeps his routines clean, focusing on normal life, especially childhood, rather than raunchy or taboo topics. Regan’s routines helped Bargatze see that comedy doesn’t have to be raunchy to be funny. Following in Regan’s footsteps, Bargatze’s jokes center on everyday life.
Because he limits himself to the normal events in life, Bargatze is constantly worried that he will run out of material someday. While he has practices that help him come up with new jokes, there is no concrete system that guarantees he can pump out new content forever.
“I worry about [running out of content] every second of the day. That’s my biggest fear,” he said. “Now I’m in a place where people are coming and they know you, like that’s a different thing, like they watch your material. Before that first Netflix [special], you have a little bit of time where people are still like, Oh, I think I know you. It’s not like they’re big fans where they’re like, no, we know everything. And now it’s gotten to the point where everybody knows everything.”
“So you had to be like, alright, I gotta get this turned around. So you just slowly do it. Sometimes you have some material that doesn’t make the special and then you kind of just move it over and you can keep working on it or move it to a different spot or something like that. And then you kind of just build out from there,” he continued.
A lot of his material comes from interactions with his wife or daughter, but he makes sure to get the okay from them before using them in his jokes. He also makes himself the butt of the joke as much as possible rather than telling jokes that mock his family.
Bargatze also talked about the importance of constantly working on his comedy. He explained that comedy is like a muscle and you need to be constantly making jokes if you want to be as funny as possible. This was an aspect of comedy that was made especially hard during the pandemic because there were few opportunities to flex that muscle.
“We were doing drive in movie theaters, so it was like, alright, let’s do some of those. And they were very rewarding to just see people out – and people wanted to be out, even just sitting in their cars [and] sitting outside. It’s not like you can really hear them laugh. It was not the easiest shows, but they were probably some of my favorite shows I’ve ever done,” he said.
“You could tell that people needed a break and a moment, and, you know, just wanted to go out and be like, let me just relax. And then we shot the special outside and all the stuff he had to do, it paid off,” Bargatze continued.
Movieguide® previously reported on Bargatze’s clean comedy:
Bargatze keeps his stand-up material clean because he still feels like he would “get in trouble” with his parents if they heard him telling a dirty joke.
“I don’t want to disappoint my parents,” Bargatze went on, saying he would also feel “mortified” and “very uncomfortable” using inappropriate material in front of them.
He continued, “I just can’t imagine cursing in front of your parents. Still, even now, I’m 43-years-old and I still just couldn’t do that. So that’s how I write. I think I write my comedy to—a lot of it is to make my parents laugh. I want them to be proud and be like, ‘Oh, come watch my son do comedy,’ and not be offended by it. I just don’t have that in me to want to offend someone or make someone feel bad.”
Bargatze also said his Christian upbringing has contributed to his commitment to staying clean onstage.
“I grew up that way,” Bargatze explained. “I come from a Christian family and Southern Christian, so I wasn’t allowed to watch anything, which I talk about in the special. And so growing up and only watching clean comedians, it was just how I was going to be. And it would feel forced if I was not.”
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