Articles about America’s top-grossing comedian, Nate Bargatze, take on an almost zoological aspect, harkening back to 2016 when reporters went to rural diners to observe swing voters in their natural habitat. The Washington Post, fumbling for a metaphor, refers to him in a profile released in anticipation of his new special Your Friend, Nate Bargatze (now streaming on Netflix) as the Walmart of comedy, a comparison only fair in terms of financial domination. Bargatze made $82 million in 2024, or roughly the current gross domestic product of the United Kingdom. 

There have been red state whisperers before Bargatze, and there will be more after him. The ghost of Jeff Foxworthy is not simply exorcised. But Bargatze rises above such classification in two ways: by not segregating himself and by being unimpeachably funny.

Many Southern comedians stick below the Mason-Dixon, either out of comfort or necessity. The famous Chitlin’ Circuit was black America’s answer to the Jewish Borscht Belt, a comedy ecosystem camped outside the barred door. Bargatze is the rare Southerner to come up in the Northern club circuit, cutting his teeth in Chicago, then Boston and primarily in New York City. The New York stand-up scene is perhaps the last true meritocracy in America — the funny survive and the failures are lucky to leave with their throats unslit. 

Clean comedy fans are often less discerning due to a paucity of options, the same way children’s movies will conquer the box office because only one is playing and the parents need a distraction, any distraction. Bargatze is widely respected by his peers because he climbed the fighting pits with the rest of them and didn’t compromise his principles. His clean jokes are forged in blood, succeeding in the same clubs that still echo with Bill Burr’s vulgar screeds. He is Andy Dufresne, who crawled through 500 yards of sewage and came out clean on the other side. 

The key to Bargatze’s comedy is his delivery. If the stenographer read back his jokes in court, the jury wouldn’t crack a smile. But when cradled in his drawl? If I may indulge in a red state analogy of my own, he delivers his routine the same way Willie Nelson sings. They share a liberal interpretation of meter, yet arrive precisely in the place they’re supposed to be, like connecting from Beijing to Paris by burrowing through the Earth’s mantle. 

The best example is his George Washington sketch on Saturday Night Live, which you might remember from your mother showing you the YouTube video on three separate occasions. As the first president, he promises a future of life, liberty, and a series of arbitrary weights and measurements. But these dad jokes take on an existential quality through his laconic locution. I mean this with the highest praise — it takes a herculean amount of effort to sound this surprised by the end of your own sentences. 

Bargatze also benefits from the severe political polarization of recent stand-up comedy. In the years after the first Trump election, comedy had all the joie de vivre of an HR seminar slideshow. Almost in backlash, stand-up comedy has taken a rightwing turn, all the way to the halls of power. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe almost cost Trump the election with jokes against Puerto Ricans at a Trump rally, but then Trump and Vance’s appearances on comedian podcasts including Tim Dillon and Theo Vonn (thanked by name on the election night stage) is credited with swinging young male voters. Trump made the pilgrimage to kingmaker Joe Rogan when Kamala did not, and somehow an interview between the former host of The Apprentice and the former host of Fear Factor took on the gravity of Frost/Nixon. 

Nate is not explicitly conservative, nor is he explicit and conservative like so many of his contemporaries. Bargatze has the fortune of hitting the sweet spot of being conservative-coded but not political. To risk another country music analogy, he is like Dolly Parton in this regard, deep-fried trappings but nothing to remind you of Reconstruction. Bargatze almost pathologically avoids politics, a tightrope now stretched to a thread. Taylor Swift (sorry, that’s three) attempted a similar path in 2016, which led to critics accusing her of fascism, their main evidence being her silence and her blonde hair. Bargatze benefits from his brown hair and a chiller reception to Trump’s second term. No one has the energy anymore for witch hunts. 

Bargatze, the eighty million dollar man, is merely riding the crest of a wider stand-up comedy surge. But if his recent special is any indication, it’s the success that might ultimately kill it. Comedy has always lived on the razor’s edge between intimacy and adversary. In clubs, you’re often just feet away from the performer, a vulnerability that cuts both ways. The audience can heckle the performer, but the comedian can also lash back with insults of their own. There’s a horror and thrill in winning an audience over, to have them set down the tomatoes for a second to learn just what the deal is with airline peanuts. 

Bargatze has now reached arena level, and there is nothing lonelier than being surrounded by 20,000 people. There is a sterility to the atmosphere, all the intimacy of German nuptials. When the audience laughs here, it sounds like the lustful flutter of locusts hovering above a crop. Moreover, the audience already loves Nate, so there’s no sport in earning that affection. They woo(!) at mere statements of fact and laugh at setups. This throws off his deliberate cadence, his finely calibrated machine having to stop and start for noises not found in nature. Bargatze is now perhaps too big to fail yet too big to succeed either. 

This recent special also paradoxically suffers from too much and too little relatability. Bargatze has always been a personable sort of fella, but his talents always lay more in discursion than observation. And as with anyone who made $80 million in the last fiscal year, your life grows slightly more difficult to relate to. Which isn’t to say Bargatze is now riffing on the way people on St. Bart’s eat their lobster, but you can feel him struggle to find complaints he can’t wave away. But this is a familiar arc to any fan of a comedian and their podcast: The goal is to rise out of the unfurnished basement, but then once you’ve ascended, there’s nothing much funny about your struggle-free life. 

Bargatze is putting his new wealth into a venture called The Nateland Company, intending to produce family-friendly entertainment of all stripes. It’s an admirable enough dream but perhaps just that: a dream. It’s cruel to expect anyone to recreate the alchemy and become another Nate, especially considering that it’s become impossible for Nate to be himself. 

Joe Joyce is a writer. Follow him on X at @bf_crane.