Nate Bargatze’s moment

The comedian from Nashville, Nate Bargatze, is having a moment. For the last couple of years, he’s been regularly hosting Saturday Night Live, participating in the hilarious ongoing sketch where he’s George Washington crossing the Delaware and musing on American oddities. He was chosen to host the 2025 Emmy Awards. He fills stadiums around the country for his stand up, and his streaming comedy specials are increasingly popular. Esquire said, “Bargatze is, quite simply, the most successful stand-up comedian working today.”

What’s amazing about this success is that the deadpan comic famous for his dry humor is doing all of this while performing “clean comedy.” His approach, he says, is to have a show that he could do in front of his parents. Recently, Bargatze was profiled in The New York Times, he said he considers all of this to be a calling: “It’s a big belief: I am second to God. Second to your family, second to the audience, second to everybody. You live to serve, so it’s very much a calling in that aspect.”

Bargatze grew up as a homeschooled Baptist and is still a committed evangelical churchgoer. His father, who often opens Nate’s shows, made a living as a magician and motivational speaker at Christian events around the country. Bargatze says, “God has a path, and I'm just here to follow the path, so I just kind of wait and see where the doors open. [God] opens the doors that need to be open, and you just point me where you want to go. ... I'm grateful to get to be the one that was chosen to be this vessel," he added.

Bargatze’s rise shows that there is a market for comedy that doesn’t offend families. This kind of entertainment is arguably more difficult. It’s easy to insert cuss words and sexual references into a monologue, but it’s much harder to observe everyday life and get a laugh out of a broad cross-section of the population. His aim, he says, is to make grandmothers laugh. In this endeavor, Bargatze is subtly counter-cultural, redeeming humor for humor’s sake, rather than as a vessel for decadence.

This is more difficult than it seems. Even those of us who believe we have a sense of humor would have a hard time sustaining it over an hour. Comedy writing may be one of the hardest forms of creativity. Jerry Seinfeld said, “A laugh is such a pure thing. There's no opinion to it. Almost every other creative field has to suffer the interpretive opinion culture, but not a standup comic. You may not like this guy, but if he's getting laughs, he's gonna work.” This also works in reverse. If a comic is not funny, there are no laughs.

So Nate Bargatze’s secret is not merely that he’s safe and clean, which is often a label given to folks who just happen not to be funny. Bargatze’s secret is that he’s actually getting laughs. He’s funny enough for people to spend time and money to see him perform. He’s funny enough that he doesn’t resort to the easy rhetorical crutch of vulgarity.

For the serious Christian, it is tempting to see entertainment like this as trivial, but to laugh is therapeutic and good for the soul. The wisest man in all the world once wrote that “a cheerful heart is good medicine” (Proverbs 17:22). Scripture promises that God will “fill your heart with laughter (Job 8:21). To laugh is not incidental to being human. It’s a necessary part of the way God created us. Excellent comedy that avoids cruelty or crassness is a mental palate cleanser, a form of rest from the stresses and difficulties of life. In his essay, “Laughter,” G.K. Chesterton observed, “Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.”

Christianity is a deadly serious mission. But that doesn’t mean we have to take ourselves so seriously. Thankfully, Nate Bargatze believes this and, through his unique calling, is bearing witness with his gift of humor. That should make us smile.