It wasn’t long ago that most comedians had the same plan as Nate Bargatze. The 45-year-old stand-up veteran, whose latest Netflix special drops on Christmas Eve and whose holiday variety show airs tonight on CBS, has dutifully avoided every pressure point currently weighing on American society. Unlike so many other comedians his age, Bargatze is fundamentally disconnected from the curdled anger over the transgender debate, racial justice, or “wokeness” at large. Nor has he adopted the dour demeanor of the leftists who dominated the scene in the 2000s – people like Patton Oswalt and David Cross, who managed to turn every punch line into an indictment of George W. Bush.

Instead, Bargatze resembles an archetypal and largely outdated nightclub comedian – the journeymen of the ’70s and ’80s who circled from casino lounge to casino lounge with a winning demeanor and a joke book full of airplane food. He doesn’t touch anything current, and he never works blue. The impeccable cleanliness of his material seems almost fanatical – Bargatze doesn’t even use this verb shit on stage, and the closest he came to discussing his Christian upbringing was when, as a youngster, full of piety and fear, he ratted out his friends for watching Friday the 13th All of this makes Bargatze himself a radical. In 2024, everyday comedy has little commercial advantage, especially when even the milquetoasts Jerry Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais have enthusiastically joined the culture war. And yet Bargatze is somehow more famous than ever. Maybe there is a mild method?

The proof is in the pudding. Bargatze has been a comedian since 2002 and by the age of 30 had already made a reasonably successful living on the race track. (In 2008, he had enough energy to book several gigs Late Night with Conan O’Brien.) But in the last three years, as his babyface began to fade and his beard began to gray, Bargatze’s career began to skyrocket. In addition to Netflix, Bargatze has filmed sets for Amazon and Comedy Central. And in a clear example of the societal tensions that have made stand-up such a difficult subject, he lost a 2022 Grammy for Best Comedy Album to Louis CK. Then, in the last 14 months, things went downhill nuclear. That mostly had to do with that Saturday Night LiveThe surprise choice of Bargatze as one of the hosts in October 2023. (The fact that the actors were still on strike couldn’t hurt.) And it had to do with a skit in particular in which Bargatze played a Revolutionary-era George Washington rallying his troops with a speech about what they were fighting for: their right to “choose our own systems of weights and measures.” The sketch was written by Mikey Day and co-head writer Streeter Seidell, but according to Day and Seidell, Bargatze immediately recognized the observational humor as being in his spirit. In an oral history of the sketch just two weeks later, Indiewire called it “the best.” SNL Sketch in Years” and has been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube. So it was no surprise when SNL invited Bargatze back this October for an episode in which his General Washington waxed lyrical about the absurdities of American English as he crossed the Delaware.

None of this can be attributed to the typical powers that produce comedy stars. He neither hosts a successful podcast nor has his own sitcom. (You won’t find it Nateland at the top of the Spotify or Apple Podcasts charts, and its ABC pilot was never picked up.) Instead, Bargatze – slowly, without anyone noticing at first – simply rose through the ranks the old-fashioned way; He brandished tons of wholesome material as he traveled across America until the basketball arenas were filled to the brim with his fans.

There is a precedent for this. Than that The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta noted in his 2021 profile of Bargatze that the man’s face is often compared to Jim Gaffigan — another comedian who spent his righteous anger on Hot Pockets rather than, you know, the Kash nomination Patel reserved. I also want to highlight Brian Regan, another squeaky clean comedian who is famous gigantic in the Mormon community as a solid analogue. But Bargatze has put his own stamp on this tried-and-true PG-rated trick. The Tennessee native speaks in a laconic patter, combining his productions and punchlines into an almost ASMR-like soliloquy on the porch. (Alberta referred to his performance as “Comedy Xanax.”) Essentially, Bargatze’s humor revolves largely around his own pervasive mediocrity as a man, father, son and American. Bargatze has joked that he couldn’t find a light switch in a hotel, so he had to sleep under the nuclear heat of the white light. He feels that the only real strength he brings to his marriage is a willingness to do laundry, which he sees as a fact in any argument he and his wife might encounter that will result in glass breaking in an emergency leads. That’s not it clever, but it’s not mindless either. And I think that’s why Bargatze has received high-profile co-signs from the likes of John Mulaney and Bill Burr – two stand-ups who have conquered much more confrontational territory and yet found genius in its wondrous ordinariness.

This makes you wonder if Bargatze was perhaps a bit of a mercenary in the way he managed his coalition. Was he aiming to conquer the unbalanced dollar? To bring an act onto the stage that can reliably act from sea to shining sea? Well, the truth is that Bargatze actually once had a bigger advantage. As he recalled in this Atlantic In this story, the comedian once invented an out-of-character joke about murdered sex workers in New York City, but dropped it after hearing from a woman in the sex industry who was offended by it. Bargatze internalized this feedback and has since smoothed out any quibbles in his work. “I just have to be very careful about anything that might seem like it’s making fun of someone,” he said. “I never want to be mean.”

Of course, Bargatze’s neutrality is a politicized stance in its own right. His dogmatic avoidance of controversy may be celebrated in progressive circles, but it also renders his catalog incapable of engaging with the glaring weaknesses of American culture. Bargatze is certainly smart enough to come up with a great joke about January 6th or the Facebook algorithm that turns our aunts and uncles’ brain matter into pale green sludge. But no, the comedian would much rather talk about his McDonald’s order. There is dignity and perhaps a little cowardice in this approach.

Therein lies the irony of his rise. When Bargatze first took hold nationally, we were sinking into the coma of the early Biden years. Americans had finally moved past the time-defining divisions of Trump’s initial rise and were hopeful that the country might be on the cusp of a well-deserved period of stasis. That optimism was dashed almost immediately. America has reaffirmed a dark social order, and I think this has recontextualized Bargatze’s popularity. In one of the most meaningful quotes from this Atlantic In the profile, Bargatze implores his audience to “turn off their brains” for an hour as he stands on stage, immersing himself in the narcotic splendor of his carefully crafted but ultimately toothless comedy. It reminds me of how, since 2023, it feels like the entire country is sleepwalking toward disaster, without the cultural mechanisms to articulate the moment. Well, now we’re here, and Bargatze – relentlessly harmless, no matter what’s at stake – is our harbinger. With that in mind, perhaps his fame after this shouldn’t be so surprising all.