The Xanax of Stand-Up

Nate Bargatze’s humor is slow, inoffensive, even soothing. And he’s one of the hottest acts in comedy.

- By Tim Alberta

Once the limousine door closed, a dozen of Nate Bargatze’s closest friends and family members began reciting their favorite jokes from the sold-out show he’d just finished in Reno, Nevada. There was the one about never asking a fitness junkie for advice on losing weight, lest they warn you about eating too much fruit. (“Let’s get to that point, all right?” Bargatze had said. “I don’t think I’m at where I’m at because I got into some pineapple last night.”) And the one about his hometown of Old Hickory, Tennessee, being named after Andrew Jackson, and a reporter informing him that the seventh president had been a bad person. (“You know, we didn’t know him or anything,” he’d deadpanned.)

As we rode through Reno on a 100-degree July night, I asked Bargatze what moment from the show stood out to him. It was the bit, he said, about the woman at a comedy club in Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose siren of a laugh was so distracting that the staff had to ask her to keep silent for the rest of the show. The joke skewered her parents for not correcting this when she was young, then segued into Bargatze’s lament about carrying his own bad habits into adulthood. It was one of the high-decibel points of the show, but that’s not why Bargatze brought it up.