You’d think a true Vanderbilt superfan—words you don’t hear together every day—would be glued to the TV as the Commodores tried to close out their win over top-ranked Alabama on Oct. 5. Nate Bargatze, though, saw only bits and pieces on a phone screen. He had a good excuse: He was hosting Saturday Night Live. The game wound down just as dress rehearsal was taking place. Luckily, Bargatze wasn’t in the cold open, which allowed him to catch the end of his favorite team’s biggest victory before going onstage for a gig that remains something of a Holy Grail for comedians.
It was a pretty good day to be Nate.
Had he been in Nashville, Bargatze, who grew up just south of the city in Old Hickory, certainly would have been at the game. He might even have taken part in storming the field and hauling a goalpost three miles down Broadway and dumping it into the Cumberland River. Bargatze helped tear down a goalpost before—it just came during a 2–9 season. “Vandy beat South Carolina for our first SEC win in, like, forever, [in 1998]” he says. “We stormed the field that game. Now I’m 18 or 19, something like that, and I’m out there with all the college kids that actually go to Vandy. And we went to go take the goalpost out, but this is when the Titans had just moved to Tennessee, and they were playing at Vandy’s stadium the next day. So this is how polite Vandy students are: There was one security guy just standing around the goalpost. He’s like, ‘Hey, guys, we got a game tomorrow, the Titans,’ and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s reasonable,’ and we all just walked away. Nowadays they would have just bulldozed that guy and took the thing down, but back then, it was like, ‘Yeah, totally makes sense.’ And then we actually tore it down the next week when we beat Duke, because they gave us that, so it looked like we were celebrating beating Duke.”
One of the key takeaways from that story is that Bargatze didn’t actually go to the school, which makes his fandom even more intriguing. Vanderbilt people can skew a little snobby. (I went there; as a freshman I bought a T-shirt that read vanderbilt: it even sounds expensive.) Bargatze, on the other hand, has built an act around his lack of intellect, like how he went to community college for a year and got zero credits.
From his act: I took math. The book said MATH. They stop calling it math after, like, sixth grade.
He got hooked on the Commodores through his father’s cousin, Ron Bargatze, who was an assistant basketball coach at the school and later was a radio color commentator. “Since Ronnie was there, we’ve always been at Vandy,” Bargatze says. “My mom worked in the ticket office when I was in high school, so we’d go all the games.
I just grew up around Vandy.”
Make no mistake, though: Bargatze, 45, might lack in book smarts, but he is a very smart guy. You can’t be as funny as he is and not be—and make no mistake, he is funny. He’s graduated from clubs to theaters to arenas (he pulled in more than 19,000 at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena last year), and his SNL stint the day of the Bama game, his second time hosting, received rave reviews.
Two of the sketches that night were sports-related. In one, he’s a golfer who keeps shanking shots and killing animals. In the other, he’s a high school football coach obsessed with getting his players to repay the money they owe him for their jerseys. It’s not uncommon for sports to appear in his stand-up. “There is something funny about sports,” Bargatze says. “[My act is] just talking about everyday situations. I’m around sports so much that it’s going to seep in.”
That can be Vandy-related, like the time he missed out on tailgating ahead of the 2008 Music City Bowl because when he picked up his ticket at will call, the attendant ripped the ticket, forcing him to enter the stadium three hours before kickoff.
The players are, like, in jeans.
Or it can be about his family, like when he went golfing with his wife and she took the cart and left him to play seven holes with only his driver.
Do you know how big of a psycho you look like when you go hit every single golf shot with the least versatile club in the bag?
Golf is something Bargatze actually takes quite seriously. It’s hard for him to play 18 holes on the day of a show—“Your brain starts thinking about the show,” he says—but he makes up for it on the road by practicing in simulators or playing Top Golf. He competed on TNT’s The Match in November, partnered with another guy with stand-up comedy chops: former NBA All-Star Blake Griffin. “He’s the best,” says Bargatze. “We just hit it off. He has great comedic timing, so I felt comfortable going back and forth with him knowing he’s not gonna stop a joke or anything.”
That appearance was part of a whirlwind couple of months. There was SNL, then he took part in the pregame festivities at the Vandy-South Carolina football game on Nov. 9. Sure, he’s not an alum.
I did not go to Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt asked me to say that, and I was like, “I think people know.” And they go, “We do too, but just say it.”
But Bargatze has a great relationship with the school, having done comedy sets for recruits in the past.
Coming up, Bargatze is hosting an old-school variety show, Nate Bargatze’s Nashville Christmas, that airs on CBS on Dec. 19—something he looks forward to sharing with his 12-year-old daughter, Harper.
[A lot of people ask, “Did you name your daughter after Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird?” And, you know, I’ve never thought about an author a day in my life, so ....]
Then his new Netflix special, Your Friend, Nate Bargatze, drops on Christmas Eve.
And let’s not forget this winter’s real big one: Vandy’s first bowl appearance in six years. Maybe this time he’ll get to tailgate.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Did Anyone Have a Better Day in 2024 Than Nate Bargatze?.
