Nate Bargatze is the first person to tell you he’s a few beers short of a six-pack. This self-assessment features prominently in his unhurried comedy, where he offers as supporting evidence that he barely graduated high school and does not know where most countries are located, or even how rain works. “Do mountains keep growing?” Bargatze wondered in his last Netflix special, The Tennessee Kid. “I don’t think we know that yet.” (We do.)
That may be why, in an era where most comedians and late-night talk show hosts serve up incisive, polarizing takes on the issues of the day, Bargatze stands out for sticking to what he does know: chain restaurants, parenting, marriage, weird animal encounters, the South, and the absurdity of human interaction. What’s more, he works clean, and without a trace of mean-spiritedness in his material.
For his upcoming second Netflix special, The Greatest Average American (March 18), the up-and-coming comedian delves further into his Southern, solipsistic, apolitical, rural humor, covering everything from COVID to Common Core to peanut allergies, all in a languid, off-the-cuff meander. It’s full of the absurd misunderstandings and indignities of everyday life, yet they track no matter what side of the aisle a viewer may hew to.
“I’m not a big topical guy,” Bargatze told Vanity Fair recently by phone. “I’m not trying to offend anybody. There’s enough of that. If you want that, you can get it.” He won’t tell audiences what to think about the issues of the day, either—he doesn’t feel that’s his place. “Politics have got into everything,” he continued. “Comedians, movies, television. So why do you need me to do it? I don’t have a college education. I almost didn’t graduate high school. What on earth can I tell you? You should never vote for something I tell you to do. I’m not smart enough.”
But as the saying goes, you have to be smart to play dumb—and Bargatze’s material is full of bits that show the kind of sly wit it takes to come off this unassuming. Take one of his more beloved riffs about trying to order an iced coffee with milk at Starbucks. After several frustrating rounds of repeating the order to the barista, he somehow ends up with a large cup of milk on ice. “I was like, Do I look like a psycho to you, dude?” he jokes. “I’ve never ordered milk publicly in the history of my life.”
In his inability to correctly communicate a seemingly simple drink order—and the mortifying awkwardness of drawing attention to himself for doing it wrong—the joke pleases anyone aware of Starbucks as a place coded for catering to affluent, artisanal coffee tastes. You may laugh at it because you agree that Starbucks’s lengthy-named concoctions are precious and highfalutin; you may laugh because you think Bargatze is a yokel. Most likely, you’re laughing for both reasons.
The Greatest Average American celebrates that sort of insularity and unease with urban, sophisticated norms—but critically, it does so in a way that often upends the audience’s expectations of where the joke will go. Bargatze is a white man from the South; our perception of the region’s comedians is so heavily connected to red-state politics and Jeff Foxworthy–esque redneck gags that we could be forgiven for assuming that the Blue Collar Comedy Tour bus might roll up to recruit him partway through. We wouldn’t, for instance, expect a defense of kids with nut allergies from anyone but urban elites—but Bargatze sides entirely with the children on this one. “I don’t know what tree nuts are,” he jokes in Greatest, “but it could kill my daughter.”
Bargatze grew up in Old Hickory, a bucolic Middle Tennessee suburban outpost. The son of a clown turned magician, he admired the comedy of Sinbad and Jerry Seinfeld. He tried a stint at community college, only to receive no credits, before working as a meter reader in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. Then he split for Chicago to workshop his comedy at the Second City, paying his dues in New York clubs for years.
He’s since become a Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon regular and has appeared on Conan and Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, as well as in a slot on The Standups. Yet Bargatze also appeared on Brad Paisley’s Comedy Rodeo and regularly testifies to his love for Walmart, college football, and golfing. The Greatest Average American’s opening track is a folksy hoedown tune called “Family” by Drew Holcomb.
Bargatze straddles these urban-rural divides with ease, playing to our perceptions about his drawl, intelligence, and background without pandering to them. He opens The Greatest Average American with a COVID sequence, deftly dodging any dreaded prescriptivism about how seriously people should take it in favor of embracing the absurdity of having one’s temperature taken by a teenager at a Buffalo Wild Wings.
For someone whose jokes don’t normally follow headlines, this is a departure. But Bargatze said that for the coronavirus, he had to make an exception. “I can’t not address COVID,” he told me. “You can’t tape a special during a global pandemic and not acknowledge it. I opened with it. And when I do my COVID jokes, I try to make them very in the middle. If there is anything topical, I do it in a very down the middle way where you wouldn’t even know what I believe.”
That middle aim speaks to the title of the show itself, which Bargatze said comes from a long-running self-perception about his unique lack of specialness. “I would always joke and say that I am the greatest average American,” he said. “I go to Applebee’s. I go to the nicest one. I’m very average American in my taste. Any poll they run, I’m right wherever the average American is. What’s it called, the Nielsen box? They should just call me, and I’ll tell them what we’re feeling.”
Such sentiments are the foundation of Bargatze’s work, which pulls its punches only to redirect them back on the comedian himself. Self-deprecation in comedy isn’t new, but there’s something unusual in Bargatze’s particular intersections—an allegedly dumb Southern comedian whose aw-shucks riffs are deceptive in their simplicity, but have a kernel of polite guilelessness at their core. “I don’t ever want to make fun of someone,” he told me. “I’ll make fun of myself. I’ll never make fun of the audience. You can either laugh with me or laugh at me.”
Most likely, we’ll do both.
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