Nate Bargatze has had a long—and by all accounts, successful—career as a comic. But he says there’s simply no match for the effect of a Saturday Night Live appearance.
Bargatze made his standup debut on Late Night with Conan O’Brien back in 2008, and went on to appear steadily on Conan, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Late Night with Seth Meyers. But as Bargatze told Billboard, the exposure of hosting Saturday Night Live last year caused his star to rise exponentially.
“It was my first kind of thing really on [a mainstream platform],” Bargatze said. “And it just sent it to a completely new level.”
Bargatze hosted the show on October 28, 2023 (alongside musical guest Foo Fighters, and cameos from Christopher Walken and Padma Lakshmi), and it ended up being a standout episode of SNL’s 49th season. Though the comic finished in the middle of the pack in LateNighter’s screentime report of the year’s hosts, the episode produced some popular segments.
Bargatze’s nine-minute standup routine gave viewers the longest monologue of the season, and the “Washington’s Dream” sketch became the show’s third-most viewed YouTube clip of the season. (Currently, it stands at more than 10 million views.)
That all resulted in 4.9 million same-day viewers, which was the biggest audience of the season at the time—and 100,000 more than the premiere episode.
The comedian, who traffics in largely clean and apolitical material, told Billboard that he credits SNL with giving him “a giant, giant leap” in his career.
Bargatze was the first standup to take the stage at Studio 8H this past season, with Shane Gillis and Ramy Youssef following him later in the season.
Bargatze’s fourth standup special, Hello World, was released on Amazon Prime Video in January. It broke a record for the streamer, drawing 2.9 million total viewers in its first 28 days.