Nobody has a bad word to say about this year’s Emmy Awards host, Nate Bargatze. This is by design. The 46-year-old comedian has become one of the hottest properties in stand-up by studiously avoiding the divisive, rage-inducing topics that most other contemporary comedians find themselves drawn towards, like moths to a trans joke. He avoids profanity as carefully as he avoids controversy, carefully expelling even the hint of vulgarity from his family-friendly sets.
Online, he is unquestionably best known for a Saturday Night Live skit he performed while hosting the show in October 2023. Bargatze didn’t even write “Washington’s Dream,” the work of SNL regulars Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell, but it made perfect use of his deadpan, folksy delivery and his eye for skewering everyday absurdities. In the sketch, Bargatze donned a powdered wig to play George Washington rallying his troops in the Revolutionary War with inspiring words about choosing “our own systems of weights and measures” and ditching British spellings. “One day, if we are brave, we will get rid of the ‘u’ in a lot of British words like color and armor,” he tells his men. “But by God, we will keep the British ‘u’ in the word glamour!” The clip has been viewed over 16 million times on YouTube, and was called “the best SNL sketch in years” before spawning a sequel.
