Nate Bargatze Says He’s Not Doing Any Roast Comedy at the Emmys
Everyone in the comedy business told Nate Bargatze to just be himself when he hosts the 77th Emmy Awards this weekend, which is disappointing for comedy fans who were hoping that he’d be a bit more like Nikki Glaser instead.
Nashville’s most prominent smooth-talking, deadpan comedian famously prefers to work clean and avoid upsetting anyone in his audience, which is why he’s one of the few true stand-up superstars who can sell out stadiums in any state, whether it’s red, blue or purple. Following a 2024 tour that made him the highest-grossing comedian in the country with over a million tickets sold, Bargatze was an obvious choice to host the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday, where television’s brightest stars will be safe from the kind of ruthless ridicule they endure every year at the Golden Globes.
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In a recent talk with CBS Mornings, Bargatze shared the advice that comedy giants like Conan O'Brien, Lorne Michaels and Stephen Colbert gave him ahead of his Emmys gig and explained how his unique approach to comedy means that nobody in the Peacock Theater audience could possibly be a bigger butt-of-the-joke than him.
When Gayle King suggested that the audience at the Emmys may be even more nervous than the host, given how some awards show emcees pounce on the opportunity to make fun of the entertainment industry’s top talents to their impossibly plucked, toned and surgically sculpted faces, Bargatze insisted that he’s the only one who has to worry about Sunday night’s material. “I’m sure we’ll have jokes about shows and all that, we will do that, but we’ll do it in a way that’s not mean or something like that, mean-spirited,” Bargatze assured.
Tony Dokoupil even suggested that Bargatze’s hosting performance will be “the first Emmys where no one in the audience is roasted,” saying, “You only roast yourself, as I recall.”
“Yes. Yeah, I mean, I’ll be able to — if there’s any (jokes) about them, I can do it through me being dumb,” Bargatze agreed. “So it’ll be done in a nicer way. But yeah, that’s the style.”
However, this wasn’t always the direction Bargatze and his writers were thinking about going, as the comic admitted, “We’ve had stuff written that, I think, was a little more roast stuff, and then it’s like, after you think about it a couple days, I’m like, ‘Nah, let’s go back another way.’ We have some fun stuff planned.”
Bargatze decided to stick to the Nateland motto of “Good, Clean Funny,” for the Emmys, which is in line with the advice he received from some comedy greats. “I talked to Conan (O’Brien) about it. Everybody is just kind of like, ‘You just have to do you,’” Bargatze said of the comedy talents he consulted ahead of Sunday, explaining that he spoke to “(Stephen) Colbert, (Jimmy) Fallon, I talked to Lorne Michaels a little bit about it. You just kind of take it all in.”
“But it all comes back to like, ‘Just do you. Do what you know to do,’” Bargatze said of the comedy industry’s feedback. And, for him, that means making fun of himself more than anyone else in the audience. So even though Bargatze won’t roast The Bear, he’ll still be way funnier than it.
