The comic Dusty Slay looks and sounds like a guy who curses. Then there’s his name, which would fit into the Attitude era of the W.W.E.
And yet, there he was on a Sunday night in September, in his signature baseball cap over long heavy-metal hair, standing in front of the words “Good, Clean Fun,” the title of a weekly PG-rated show at the Zanies comedy club in Nashville.
This incongruity is at the core of his crafty, old-school act. Fiddling with his hat the way Rodney Dangerfield adjusted his tie, Slay begins by deploying his catchphrase. “We’re having a good time,” he says, the refrain operating like a steady bass line to his set.
Once into his material, he sells the idea that he’s just sharing random thoughts. “I like to look at birds,” he muses, before distinguishing that from bird watching. “There’s a difference,” he insists, illustrating the point by acting out a scene between two guys. “You looking at a girl over there?” says one, then he deepens his voice into something creepy and leers. “No. I’m watching her.”
It was a sexually tinged joke that in his deft delivery stayed just this side of wholesome. The packed crowd loved it. Sitting near me, a businessman from Augusta, Ga., said that he always went to this show when he was in town. The fan, who pointed out that Slay taped his podcast next door, added that he liked clean comedy, and the one of the reasons seemed less prudish than purist: “Using dirty words is cheap.”
AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE COASTS, the stand-up scene that gets the most attention these days is Austin, Texas. But Nashville, I’d argue, is the more important comedy city. It has a large industry footprint (800 Pound Gorilla, a producer of specials that aims to be the “Netflix of comedy,” is there) and is a major destination for podcast guests; it’s where Theo Von tapes his show. But most important, Nashville has emerged as the center of a resurgent clean comedy scene.
Brian Regan and Jim Gaffigan have built long, lucrative careers on inoffensive, sexless material. But they remain exceptions in a world of two-drink minimums and age requirements for attendance. In the past few years, however, three family-friendly stand-ups — Dusty Slay, Leanne Morgan and Nate Bargatze — have become stars on Netflix while living in Tennessee and working out new material at Zanies.
Slay, who hosts a podcast with Bargatze and two others, is one of the funniest comics working today; he released a dynamite Netflix special this year titled “Wet Heat.” Morgan wrote and starred in “Leanne,” a recent Netflix sitcom produced by Chuck Lorre, and just released her second special, “Unspeakable Things,” also on Netflix. Bargatze looms largest, as a comedian and a tastemaker.
He was the highest-grossing touring comedian in the United States last year, and in an even more impressive display of popularity, his awkward, critically panned stint as host of the Emmys still resulted in higher ratings than the previous ceremony.
Bargatze has a vision that goes beyond stand-up. After moving back to Nashville from Los Angeles, he created a clean comedy empire with his company, Nateland. He produces live shows, including “Good Clean Fun”; new podcasts, like one featuring the comic Dustin Nickerson and his wife, Melissa; and specials from safe-for-work comics like Greg Warren (“The Salesman”) and Ryan Hamilton (whose next hour Bargatze directed). Bargatze just signed up to host a game show on ABC.
There is a distinct aesthetic that Bargatze champions: relatable, apolitical, inoffensive. Clean-cut white men are well represented. The extent of the Nate Bargatze phenomenon may not be entirely clear because he does not show up in the discourse. He doesn’t beef with other stars and steers clear of controversy. His success stems from the insight that audiences still wanted, but weren’t getting, the kind of escapist, broadly likable comedy that was a regular part of the cultural diet on network television in the 1980s and ’90s.
As the culture fragmented and went online, comics started competing for niches while the middle was increasingly ignored. And when the anything-goes internet replaced television as the major entry point for a career, comedy styles changed. The culture that made stars of Ray Romano and Jerry Seinfeld was now producing comics like the moodily confessional Jerrod Carmichael and the ranting, nihilistic podcaster Tim Dillon.
More than any other breakthrough comic of the last decade, Bargatze exploited this overlooked commercial opportunity. His specials aimed for everyone, shunned profanity and positioned him as a family man. His young daughter introduced him onstage.
But he also avoided being too corny. His emotional register ran cold and slightly cranky, zeroing in on irritations with hotel rooms, aging, marriage. And from a business point of view, he intentionally reached audiences others ignored. He is the only comic I have seen play Radio City Music Hall at 5 p.m., a time when you can draw grandparents and children alike.
SLAY AND BARGATZE BOTH ACT DOPIER than they are. “Every history movie I watch on the edge of my seat,” Bargatze deadpans. They are Southern comics with accents they wear lightly. And they don’t play the country rube the way the stars of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, another clique of Southern stand-ups, did in the early 2000s.
These new clean comedians feel as if they have arrived in a time machine, from an era before the culture wars took over. Sometimes, this makes their work lack specificity or personality, like a tasteful hotel lobby. But this blandness also gets at the escapist core of their appeal.
They convey a red-state sensibility in a way that “Seinfeld” projected a Jewish one: obvious and meaningful to most people but subtle enough to be ignored or missed by others. They’re traditionalists who make references to NASCAR, Cracker Barrel and country music. You are more likely to hear about church and Christianity in their sets than at acts in clubs on the coasts.
But to the extent they connect their background to anything political, it’s in the subtext. Bargatze praises the work of PETA in a way that assumes his audience might find it overly woke. In his recent special, Slay gently poked fun at Covid restrictions, then immediately softened it by saying: “OK, we’re having a good time.”
Morgan, a vivid storyteller who lives in Knoxville, Tenn., and grew up in a small town outside Nashville, is, like Slay, cleaner than she seems. She leans into the perspective of a women with a past. In a scene where older women rarely break through — Kathleen Madigan, another very funny older Tennessee comic, has a new special on Prime on Nov. 21 — she didn’t become famous until she was a grandmother in her 50s.
Morgan has shot to fame lately with an act rooted in nostalgic pleasures. She repeatedly says that in her youth, she lived it up. And you believe her. There’s a sneaky swagger — and poetry — to her Southern charm. Describing her comedy roots in sales, she told Seth Meyers on “Late Night” that she “started selling jewelry in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to make a little money to get my hair highlighted.”
She can be bawdy, but discreetly so; like a Hitchcock movie, the dirt is left to the imagination. In her previous special, she curses once, but with such a sugary Southern accent that you barely notice. But whereas Bargatze hints at a throwback appeal, Morgan is more overt. She leans into folksiness, describing an aging member of Def Leppard as “barely-a-going.” And when she is surprised, her mouth gapes into a mug right out of vaudeville.
“Leanne,” which stayed on the Netflix Top 10 for weeks, looks to the past as much as she does. Everything about the aesthetic of this show suggests a network sitcom from the 1980s or ’90s, including the theme song, the laugh track and the credits. Even the cast seems designed to make us think of our favorite shows of yesteryear: Kristen Johnston from “3rd Rock From the Sun” plays her sister; Celia Weston from “Alice” her mother; and Blake Clark from “Home Improvement” her father.
Just seeing these familiar faces evokes pleasant childhood memories for many. As with “Home Improvement,” this is a project that began with a stand-up act. In the first episode, when her husband leaves her, Morgan repurposes a line: “Men only have so many words they use in a day.”
I ONCE CONDUCTED something of an experiment to see how family-friendly stand-up could be. For a week, I tried to take my 7-year-old daughter to live shows that wouldn’t make either of us uncomfortable. It was largely a mortifying failure. I concluded that my parenting instincts were questionable and that there was a large untapped comedy market.
Another way to put this: Part of the new clean comedy is just good business. As comedy gets more digital, and audiences discover stand-up online rather than in clubs, more young people are becoming fans. And making entertainment that they can watch with their parents can be lucrative.
Look at the careers of two of the most successful comedians ever: Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld. Years before he served time in jail for sexual assault, Cosby was known as an artist who could be
sanctimonious about dirty comedy. In the legendary concert film “Raw,” Eddie Murphy imitates Cosby calling him up to complain about the foul language in his act — or as he memorably put it, the “filth flarn filth.”
Seinfeld has said there is too much cursing in comedy, arguing that comics use it to get a laugh that they wouldn’t otherwise. He told Marc Maron he liked working clean because it “was so much more difficult.”
He’s not wrong. Cursing is a tremendously useful tool — and it can be a crutch. At “Good Clean Fun,” a few comics struggled, even growing defensive about staying clean. When a bearded stand-up in a “Golden Girls” T-shirt introduced himself by saying “I’m going to do some clean comedy for ya’ll,” he sounded worried.
What distinguishes the new clean comics is that they do not speak about cursing by their peers with disdain or condescension. They are not judgmental. The culture has become so coarse that dismissing cursing would be silly, an insistence that comics should not reflect the world as it is.
On a recent podcast, Slay and Bargatze discussed clean comedy as a lost art that young comics would be wise to learn. “You don’t have to be clean, but at least know how to be,” Bargatze said, making the move from clean to dirty sound as useful as code-switching.
Comedians like Sarah Silverman and Anthony Jeselnik often soften the impact of an offensive joke with an innocent smile. In a way, Slay and Morgan are doing the reverse: They make wholesome material seem less so.
At “Good, Clean Fun,” Slay built tension by worrying about his ability to tell a story about a pit bull. “I’m not sure this is going to be clean,” he said, pausing to let the audience snicker over what was to come. Most nights at a club, this joke would not come close to testing good taste. But family-friendly comedy has new boundaries to play with. Only at a clean show could this story have the titillation of dirty joke
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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