Nate Bargatze – Celebrity About

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And just when you thought we were done talking about Nate Bargatze’s performance hosting the Emmys two weeks ago, the conversation continues. By Nate. In the familiar, comfortable setting of his own podcast, Nate shared some backstory on the gimmick he came up with for trying to curb acceptance speeches. He promised at the top of the show to donate $100,000 of his personal funds to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, with the caveat that he would add to or subtract from that figure based on the length of every acceptance speech, at a rate of $1,000 per second. How’d that work out? Nate ended up donating $250k, padding to cover the extensive overage in time (and deficit in money earned). The idea could have worked, possibly, but it was undermined by the fact that… it was the only thing Nate prepared!! (Sorry, he did make a ~~half-assed~~ “subtle” joke via wardrobe, but few caught it.) Anyway, here’s Nate ruminating on how he thought the bit would play out:

Nate Bargatze proved to be a charitable, generous man at the 77th Emmy Awards — not that he especially planned to be.

The stand-up comic said on his Nateland podcast that he never planned on donating $250,000 of his own money to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, as he did at the end of the Emmys.

“I had it in my head one way. It kind of came out another way, but — the reasoning was there,” Bargatze said of the running gag. “I wasn’t gonna give that money at the end, like, I wasn’t thinking I was gonna have to. But the way it went, I was like, ‘I can’t — I’m not gonna not …’”

The bit went like this: Bargatze, while opening the live awards show, pledged $100,000 of his own money to the Boys & Girls Clubs. Awesome. Even awesome-r, for every tick under 45 seconds a winner’s acceptance speech lasted, Bargatze would add another $1,000 from his own pocket. However, for every second over 45 seconds a winner went, he’d deduct $1,000 from the running tally. The bank ended up quite a bit in the red.

Bargatze says CBS had specifically asked him to come up with a way to keep acceptance speeches tight. CBS “loved” what he came up with, Bargatze said, as did “everyone at home.”

You know who didn’t? “A lot of the reviews,” Bargatze acknowledged.

…Bargatze saw this thing going a whole ‘nother way.

“I thought it was gonna be, I dunno, Netflix, or Apple,” Bargatze said on Nateland’s 271st episode. “If someone was giving these long speeches, I just thought they could be like, ‘and Netflix is gonna cover my overage.’”

“In my head, I pictured they could then go long, but then be a hero,” he said. “But I think I could have explained it more, to be honest.”

And he almost did. Bargatze said he “almost sent an email out” ahead of the show to explain the game and what he hoped to accomplish with it. A good idea, in hindsight.

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

Wait, he thought the big studios would pick up the tab for their own winners? For a premise they weren’t aware of nor agreed to ahead of time? Now that’s funny, Nate! How woefully naive, bless his heart. Also, did he basically just admit that his plan was to say he’d be donating… and then not actually donate? Some other notes: for one, he kept using the refrain “in my head.” Did he not have a team of writers for this? I think it’s imperative to have a collaborative effort for hosting an awards show for the very reason that not everything unfolds in real life the way the way you imagine it will in your own head. Along those lines, if you think your gag might benefit from a detailed email of rules sent out before the ceremony, then it’s not ready for primetime. And finally — though this is more for the network than Bargatze — if you really want to cut show length, please look first to the unnecessary reunions and tributes and musical/modern dance interpretations of gathering in front of the television. It’s really that simple! Then again, the ratings were way up this year, so what do I know…

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I’ve been ~~ranting~~ opining all week about Nate Bargatze’s performance as Emmys host. I won’t relitigate the whole thing again, but to sum it up I was disappointed that he only had one bit for the entire evening, checking in on that asinine tally that was trying to pressure winners into giving nano-second speeches. I can be fair-minded, though, (stop laughing) and was startled to be informed of a correction: there was one other joke… it was just so “subtle” that no one caught it. Remember that mystifying moment midway when Bargatze waltzed out in a blue jean tux? He said, “I have a blue jean tux on for some reason. We had, like, a joke. There’s a cummerbund, and I forgot what it — I don’t know,” and then he introduced Sydney Sweeney as a presenter. Apparently, his outfit was a joke on Sweeney’s much-maligned, eugenics-flavored American Eagle ad campaign. The Hollywood Reporter weighs in on the age-old question: if a joke bombs in the Peacock Theater, and everyone is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?

A colleague, clearly more plugged in to fabric-based controversies than I, asked, “Was that [a] Sydney Sweeney joke? The jeans tux?”

My response, verbatim: “I don’t think so? Unless I missed some dialogue…”

She was right, I was wrong. Well, I was sort of wrong. Though I didn’t miss any dialogue, I do believe the joke was missing dialogue. That was by design, a person with knowledge of the bit told The Hollywood Reporter. Bargatze, an outspoken Christian who works squeaky clean, doesn’t degrade and doesn’t wade into controversy. The denim tux was him going there about Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle billboard and ad, in which the Hollywood “It” girl poses alone with the double entendre copy, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” Basically, some of the chronically-online found the message to be that only blonde-haired, blue-eyed white women have “great genes.”

The suit was the setup and the Sweeney intro was the punchline. What was spoken in the middle was simply Bargatze-patter — there wasn’t actually “a joke” he “forgot” as he stated.

Unfortunately, the “joke” doesn’t stand on the visual itself. Bargatze was in a tux, while Sweeney, at her most denim-y, wore jeans and a jean jacket. … Yes, Bargatze’s formal wear and Sweeney’s dressed-down modeling moment both featured denim-based outfits, but this side of cotton, denim is probably our most common textile — parody only works when the original work is recognizable within the spoof. Multiple people attending the awards show told me that they didn’t pick up on the joke, and a source who was backstage acknowledged a tepid response to the moment.

To call the joke “subtle,” as a number of my colleagues did, would be endorsing it for a level of cleverness and recognizability. Even with the info I have today, I cannot get on board with that classification. Not to overstate the importance of the moment, but a comedic cost-benefit analysis would probably conclude that, given what Bargatze had to work with, the risk of confusion outweighed its potential benefit. And as we all know, the best comedy comes out of economists’ tools.

For her part, Sweeney took to the stage with no acknowledgment of the moment and no interaction with Bargatze — not in a rude way, just in a doing-the-job way. Sweeney either didn’t catch the joke, didn’t hear it, or ignored it, which could have been her choice or a choice made for her for the sake of the joke.

Either way, the joke needed more — like, I don’t know, a joke?

[From THR]

“Bargatze, an outspoken Christian who works squeaky clean, doesn’t degrade and doesn’t wade into controversy.” Ugh, major eyeroll. For one thing, the implication that any one single group, in this case Christians, have a moral high ground is insulting. Second, if Bargatze truly didn’t want to “wade into controversy,” he wouldn’t have come out in a jean tuxedo at all! Which makes me suspect that this is just him trying to push back on the lukewarm-to-scathing reviews he got. Because much like the British Royal Family, there’s no half-in half-out with joke-telling. You gotta commit to the bit, otherwise it’s just a half-assed attempt at relevant social commentary, held back by someone not daring enough to risk ruffling feathers. And that’s exactly what we got from Bargatze, an effort so muddled it was completely unrecognizable as a “joke.” Also, having a general policy of not wanting to touch on controversies is a very limiting stance for a stand-up comic! Comedians are truth-tellers, and today more than ever, truth is controversial.

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