Clean comedy
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
Evening Times Editor
I have always been a fan of stand-up comedy. I guess it started when I was a kid and I got to stay up late enough to watch Johnny Carson’s monologue on “The Tonight Show” and sometimes even late enough to watch the stand-up comedians that would sometimes be on the show.
But it wasn’t too long before we got HBO and I was exposed to the comedians that would be the biggest influence on me, like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy. And in case you are somehow unfamiliar with their work, they are prone to using prolific profanity.
Now, I get that some people would rather not hear that kind of language, but it has never bothered me, but I did eventually see that there was a very cool factor to being able to get the crowd to laugh along when you’re actually not using those famous
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four-letter words. It is probably, in fact, harder these days to “work clean” in stand-up comedy because we’ve been conditioned as an audience over the years to expect the bad language thanks to the likes of Christ Rock, Martin Lawrence and such. But there are those who can pull it off.
As terribly as he ended up, Bill Cosby was a master of clean comedy. Bob Newhart was too. More recently, Jeff Foxworthy made a career of only offering family-friendly fare, even if his “You might be a redneck if…” bit wore thin after a while. But it is becoming a rarer and rarer idea.
However, I recently became aware of a comedian that does, here in 2025 (and his whole career before now) work clean. His name is Nate Bargatze, and despite the exotic sounding name, he’s actually from Tennessee. He has been around for years but it was only in the past couple of years that he has really blown up as a national act, thanks in large part to hosting “Saturday Night Live” in 2023 and 2024. He’s also got a couple of standup specials you can watch on Netflix, and this past holiday season, CBS actually gave him is own special, “Nate Bargatze’s Christmas in Nashville,” which was a great throwback to all those variety shows that the networks used to run around the holidays back in the day.
And he’s actually very funny, never afraid to poke fun at himself. He’s a family man and a lot of his material comes from that. He’s also got a great deadpan delivery that really seals the humor of his “everyman” style. If you like to laugh, I highly recommend checking him out.
