Saturday Night Live Recap: Nate Bargatze Cracks the SNL Code

By Joe Berkowitz, an entertainment reporter and cultural commentator.

“I’m as shocked as you are that I’m here,” Nate Bargatze told the audience during his first Saturday Night Live monologue last November. At the time, the host’s lightly self-deprecating banter was probably accurate. Bargatze is a seasoned standup veteran who’s played increasingly larger venues since he began popping up in the mid-2010s, and yet he’s never had a starring sitcom or movie role for the standup-agnostic masses to digest. (His only acting credit so far is from a 2014 episode of Maron.) Still, his SNL debut ended up not only producing the best sketch of season 49 with “Washington’s Dream,” it delivered the show’s highest ratings in nearly a year. Talk about a shock.

Now, Bargatze has quickly returned as a conquering hero. If he was at all surprised this time around that a single prior appearance may have vaulted him to the John Mulaney level of hosting once a season even if he doesn’t necessarily have anything to plug, well, it certainly didn’t seem that way. Then again, one of Bargatze’s greatest assets is that it’s hard to tell what’s going on beneath that impenetrable veneer. Seldom has a comedian’s affect seemed so directly in conflict with the thrust of their material. Is he nervous? Amused with himself? Having the time of his life? Who’s to say.

In both his standup and his sketch work, Bargatze’s delivery suggests a guy simply trying to convey information, unaware of the belly laughs coming in response. He tosses off punchlines like scene-setting filler; deader than the deadest deadpan, straighter than the straightest straight man, yet with crackerjack timing that often zigs when it seems like it should be zagging. Bargatze’s ultra-aloof delivery hit hardest last year with the monumental “Washington’s Dream.” Fortunately for all involved, that sketch seems to have unlocked Bargatze’s full potential for the SNL crew, and this time around, they apparently made the entire airplane out of the black box.

Here are the highlights:

Now that the season premiere got the introductions out of the way, SNL’s farm team of election-year ringers can actually play ball. This week’s cold open wisely zooms out of the big VP debate to look in on Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph) and Doug Emhoff (Andy Samberg) watching from home. The extra layer allows for jokes about the debate and jokes about the experience of watching it—Harris’s experience, in particular, but also pretty much everyone’s.

Few could have predicted, and even fewer knew quite what to make of, the overwhelmingly agreeable tone between the two debaters, which the show heightens into a sensual sort of bro-ing out.  It’s a fine opportunity, though, to build out the performers’ characterization of our new friends JD Vance and Tim Walz. Bowen Yang seizes on Vance’s debate habit of applying the sunniest, most chipper tone to radical ideas and sneaky evasions, while Jim Gaffigan as Walz embodies the act of being folksily in way over one’s head. Dana Carvey’s discombobulated Biden doesn’t quite run away with the sketch again this time, but he does cement the character’s new non sequitur catchphrase: “Guess what. And by the way.”

They did it. Those crazy bastards really did it. As an enormous fan of the original sketch, I of course considered that Bargatze’s return to the show might occasion a sequel to “Washington’s Dream,” but I dismissed the idea. No way they had enough left in the chamber for another one, I thought. What a fool I was. This time, the reveal of Bargatze in Revolution-era gear is greeted by the studio audience with a mild applause break. The clappers clearly saw his previous episode and knew what was coming—that they were about to get another celebration of America’s decision to “do our own thing with the English language.” Is what follows better than the original? Of course not. The element of surprise is obviously gone, and so is all the first-thought-best-thought material. But the fact that this sequel is merely “very funny” and not “an instant classic” is no slight against it. And I would put up Bargatze’s response to the question of what will go on the back of the dollar against anything that happened in the first sketch.

Aggressively campy Spanish-language variety show Sábado Gigante has been off the air for nearly a decade, and yet it lives on forever in the hearts of those who grew up watching. This sketch reviving it works on two levels: It feeds SNL’s once-underserved Latino viewers deftly tweaked nostalgia, and it gives unfamiliar gringos a less-xenophobic version of the ’90s sketch where Chris Farley is trapped on a Japanese game show. Bargatze’s hapless audience member, who appears to have a month’s worth of DuoLingo under his belt, is more sweetly puzzled than frightened (“Why was that guy dressed like Dracula?”), which makes for a more respectful fish-out-of-water take than in previous eras, without sacrificing the funny.

There must be a vast range of time spans among viewers between the moment this sketch opens with a corpse at the top of a water slide, and the moment they realize the most efficient way to get that corpse down from there. Conversely, there is probably precious little deviation in the reaction among viewers upon reaching that realization: pure, unbridled glee.

Many times over the course of last season, Heidi Garner proved herself a master physical comedian. All of that work, however, may have only been a prologue for her tour-de-force performance wolfing down a mile-high burger. She really goes for it. By the time she’s through, in fact, it’s easy to picture her housing an entire lasagna just to cheer up Bargatze’s character.

• Maya Rudolph is such a pro, she can flub a line about Bruce Springsteen about as hard as it’s possible to flub a line, and effortlessly make the mistake itself seem funny.

• With this week’s monologue, Bargatze has given processed-foods enthusiasts a new vocabulary for describing ourselves: we are “farm-factory-table” people.

• Not the armed service veterans turning their backs to that golfer after his ball took out a bald eagle’s nest!

• Reading between the lines, clearly much of the ever-evolving SNL team regrets having Donald Trump host the show while running for president in 2015 and having Elon Musk host the show while being Elon Musk in 2021. Although they’ve certainly attempted to balance out those decisions by making fun of Trump and Musk as often as possible, it’s refreshing to see them instead hold the show to account. See for instance last night’s Weekend Update, in which Colin Jost said of Musk joining Trump at a rally, it “might be the last time Trump and Musk will be together until they cohost our Christmas show.

• Elsewhere on Update, new cast member Jane Wickline performed a song about not partying, during which Jost fed her an exit line two minutes in and she responded, direct to camera: “I intend to keep singing.” It’s a promising introduction to how the unassuming energy of Wickline’s TikToks might play on the show.

• It turns out having Samberg along for the ride this season means also having his Lonely Island running buddy Akiva Schaffer, who appears alongside him this week in the wackadoo Sushi Glory Hole sketch. That any random episode might contain a new Lonely Island gem is just more evidence that this season might end up being amazing.

• Seeing an OG-style digital short, though, only underscores that this is the second episode in the new season without a Please Don’t Destroy sketch. What’s going on there? We need a status update pronto, beyond just this recent Instagram video from Ben Marshall about pigeons destroying the trio’s office.

• This may seem like a backhanded compliment, but the best thing about the locker room sketch is it ends quickly. Bargatze’s delivery can only carry a one-note premise so far, and any longer than two minutes and 26 seconds would have been too long.