Nate Bargatze Says This Drives His Clean Comedy Style

Published: March 25, 2026

By Michaela Gordoni

Nate Bargatze is a famously clean comedian, but he didn’t always surround himself with like-minded comics.

“It’s kind of like school. You just find your group that you’re kind of going to be with. Weirdly my group that I was the closest to were the dirtiest comedians…Big Jay Oersonson, Louis J. Gomez. Dan Soder was Dan the dirtiest,” Bargatze recalled. “I would open for them.”

Podcast host Monica Padman asked him if he was ever tempted to use a dirtier joke.

“My mind just didn’t go that route of writing that kind of way. And I never wanted to make someone feel bad in the crowd,” he explained. “I just didn’t like it, and it and it would make me so uncomfortable to do that.”

“So I was always making fun of myself,” he said. “So, I think it kind of kept me in that realm.”

He recalled a joke he once made about prostitutes who were getting murdered by a serial killer in New York.

“It worked very much — I’m a young comic — it works very much in those rooms. And then I did it maybe out here, and I didn’t put it up on YouTube, but it got put up on YouTube,” he said.

A prostitute saw it, was hurt by the insensitivity and sent him a message about it.

“I said, ‘Look, I was like, I’m so sorry…I didn’t know it was going to go up…I wouldn’t do that joke again,’” he said.

“That’s just so rare in this space. It’s so rare,” Padman told him, explaining how a lot of comics don’t feel bad at all and double down on their offensive jokes.

“I think about the singular person,” Bargatze explained.

He knows that every person in his audience is an individual, so he doesn’t think of them as some mass. He knows his audience is human, just like him.

He jokes are non-political for the same reasons. He just wants everyone to have a laugh.

Bargatze, who hosted the 2025 Emmy Awards, said, “It doesn’t matter what religion you are. It doesn’t matter what your politics are. I don’t think I need to guide you in any direction.”

“I can tell you who I am. This is why I tend to be that way, and then I steer it in a direction that welcomes everybody,” he explained. “Whether you’re not a Christian or you’re conservative or Democrat or whatever you are, that’s not what this is about.”

He believes God gave him this role as a comedian.

“It’s very much a calling in that aspect that I feel,” Bargatze said. “But again, it’s trying to ride that balance. I don’t want it to be this or that. I just want people to feel welcome.”

Bargatze next project, his first movie, THE BREADWINNER, comes out on May 29.

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