It's been a long time since I reviewed any stand-up comedy. I stopped watching them last year for a couple of reasons. For one thing, no one was making any new specials because of Covid and also because most of the ones that they did have that were filmed prior to the whole world freaking out about a virus with a 99.xx% survival rate almost all of the Netflix comedy specials had some sort of agenda (mostly political) and I don't like being preached to, I like to be entertained - not persuaded to think a certain way by a guy / girl with a microphone.
Thankfully Nate Bargatze didn't do any of the preachy crap, or I probably would have turned it off. I've never heard of the guy after all.
In this special, Nate, who apparently has a somewhat famous magician father (who almost certainly helped him get into showbiz, just like the unfunniest comedian of all time, Amy Schumer) tells us a 1 hour string of jokes that are mostly about day-to-day life and his experiences in it. This is actually one of my favorite type of humor and I think most of my most liked specials have involved exactly this sort of thing. The only problem with this type of humor is that eventually the person runs out of material since we all only have so many experiences to regale people with. You can't just find humor in everything and we see this happening to a lot of different comedians most notably Jim Gaffigan, who is someone that I have bought all of his books only to discover that the books are basically a drawn out version of his stand-up including entire punchlines, which I found kind of lazy.
Bargatze uses no props and has only a microphone and he touches base on topics such as not being very smart, the trials of turning 40, and his family. Some of it is extremely funny to the point where I had a few "laugh tears" but for the most part it is more "oh, that made me smile" type funny. Nate is decent, but I don't think he is going to be joining the ranks of the best any time soon. He has been mentioned by one of my favorite comedians of all time as a potential new "King of Comedy" but I gotta say that I don't think I agree with that.
One thing I did like about him and shows that he does have some real promise is that it is clear that he is funny on the fly, rather than just in a scripted way because since this special was filmed outdoors in a Covid environment where the tables were spaced out and everyone was wearing masks and it was in Hollywood, on occasion a helicopter would fly over and his commentary about the helicopters, which didn't seem to be built into the act, was some of the funniest moments of the entire show.
I have seen a few acts out there where things that couldn't possibly be built into the show such as handling hecklers or someone's phone ringing during a show where the comedian goes into some ad-libbed hilarity and at least in my mind, if a comedian can pull that off it shows that they are a real talent.
Mostly I feel as though The Greatest Average American is a good way to spend an hour and since nothing happens on screen that you need to see (Nate's delivery is almost always dead-pan and he doesn't use his hands for anything other than holding the microphone) you can also do other stuff while you are watching it such as clean your living room - which is what I did... Trust me when I say that it really needed it.
Therefore, my opinion is that this is one of the better featured stand-up specials on Netflix at the moment (thanks to Covid there aren't actually very many of them,) but since I only laughed a handful of times I can't really rank Nate in the top end. I also just realized that I accidentally lied about having "never heard of the guy" since he is already in my list below. :)
If you are interested here is a list of the specials I have watched that are currently available on Netflix (for my region anyway.)
