Here’s How Nate Bargatze Is Becoming A Clean Comedy Mogul
Nate Bargatze’s brain just works in clean jokes, he told CBS Sunday Morning. “With writing, it’s the only way I’ve thought,” he explained. “It’s not like I have dirty jokes that I have to not do. I just don’t think in that direction.”
That natural inclination turned out to be good for business. While other comics coming up around the same time as Bargatze were imitating the hilariously filthy Dave Attell, Bargatze was finding his own voice (although in the beginning, it sounded an awful lot like fellow clean comic Brian Regan). In addition to developing rock-solid routines that were TV-friendly, his definitive style made it easier for him to work with writers on Saturday Night Live.
“I was able to go in there and go, I’m not going to curse and I’m not going to be political,” he said. “And it just gives people direction. … When you’re like, ‘You can do whatever you want,’ that’s very hard to write for.”
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Comedians who know how to work clean have an advantage, he argued, over comics who appear “on YouTube where there’s no restrictions, and then they go to Netflix where you can say whatever you want. You go down a path that … you don’t know how to (have) that professionalism. And that professionalism is what I think made old Hollywood so great. So it’s just a matter of bringing that back.”
Bargatze is bringing back Old Hollywood through Nateland Entertainment, a “family-friendly content company” through which he’s producing podcasts, stand-up specials and scripted episodic content that bear the “clean” label. There’s a Nateland theme park in the works, as well as a farm team of up-and-coming comics who share his freshly scrubbed approach.
“If you’re working hard, and you’re clean, and you’re really funny, and you’re just not getting noticed, he’ll give you some help, some encouragement, the idea that at least you’re getting somewhere,” explained friend and comic Julian McCullough.
Just how serious is Bargatze about building his clean comedy empire? He’s talked openly about becoming the next Walt Disney, even though he wants nothing to do with the current company that bears his name. “Now Disney is run by a guy that’s just a businessman,” Bargatze told Esquire earlier this year. “Well, that guy doesn’t care about the audience.”
Bargatze is convinced clean comedy has an audience, and that his Nateland empire can serve it. But he understands that even clean comedians run into trouble. Some Christians, for example, might not think Bargatze’s punchlines are “completely the clean way you might want it to be clean,” he acknowledged. “I can’t please everybody. I’m going to live in a PG, PG-13 world, and I’ll do my best.”
