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Nate Bargatze opened the 2025 Emmy Awards with a throwback to his most popular “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
The stand-up comedian, 46, played the inventor of television, Philo T Farnsworth, in a new take on his past “SNL” skit where he played George Washington.
This time, he was joined by “SNL” stars Bowen Yang, Mikey Day and Austin Johnson, following the show’s Season 51 cast shakeup, and they mocked the state of television.
Bargatze joked that streaming is “a new way for companies to lose money” with stars that mostly feature “murderers, real-life murderers mostly.”
Bargatze took jabs at some of the nominated shows, including “Severance,” saying, “It’s shows about people, who when they go to work, they switch to different people in their brains who only remember what happens at work.”
“I don’t understand that, sir,” said Day.
“People who watch it won’t either,” Bargatze replied. “But by God, it will be on TV.”
The comedian also mentioned “gripping dramas like The Pitt” and “laugh-out-loud comedies like The Bear. A heartbreaking look at the emotional toll of trauma.”
“That sounds like a drama, sir,” Yang said about “The Bear.”
“And yes, it is not,” Bargatze added, referring to the Hulu series’ controversially being slotted in the comedy categories.
Bargatze also joked that CBS is the “network for white people” and that “most people will watch football and Yellowstone” rather than the TV shows nominated at the 2025 Emmys.
After the first award of the night went to Seth Rogen, Bargatze came out onstage and joked about forcing the stars to keep their acceptance speeches short.
“What I came up with is everyone gets 45 seconds. Give your speech, I know how hard you have all worked to get here. I’m not trying to take anything away 45 seconds is all you got,” he told the audience. “If you wanna do more than that, do it on social media later. More people are gonna see it there anyway.”
“To start the show, I am gonna donate $100,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of America,” Bargatze continued, as the crowd clapped. “Remember how fun that was, cause this part is hard to say. If you stay 45 seconds, it stays at $100,000. If every second you go over 45 seconds, we will deduct $1,000 from the Boys and Girls Club. I know. It’s tough. It’s brutal.”
Bargatze went on, “If you go under, we will put $1,000 a second back on with the Boys and Girls of America. Relax, let’s have fun.” He then revealed that Rogen was six seconds under the 45-second mark, so he added $6,000 to the total amount.
During his red carpet interview with Entertainment Tonight, Bargatze said that his parts of the show “will be dumb and silly.” He also said his monologue is “gonna be good.”
Days before the show, Bargatze promised that the ceremony would not be political, even after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“I know there’s heartbreaking stuff that’s been happening right now, but I want this night to be an escape and I think that’s why I was brought on,” he told Entertainment Weekly on Thursday.
“I think a lot of people are watching, I know they watch my stand-up for that reason, so I just don’t wanna break that trust that I have in them, and just make the night be a fun night,” Bargatze explained. “Everybody has to deal with that stress all day long. So I wanna be just that one escape where they can turn something on and hopefully relax and just have fun.”
Bargatze also vowed to not offend the celebrities at the Emmys.
“We’re not trying to just go be mean to everybody. I want it to be a fun, silly night that everybody can have kind of an escape,” he shared. “Basically, I don’t want to, when I see them afterwards, it to be weird. I want them to be fun and good-natured and them be good sports about it.”
Being that he never hosted the Emmys before, Bargatze told EW that he got advice from past award show hosts including Jimmy Kimmel, who emceed the program in 2012, 2016 and 2020.
“He wrote down a lot of stuff for me,” Bargatze said of Kimmel, 57. “One of the big ones was to sit down… When you’re off camera, go sit down. So that was good advice.”
While on Kimmel’s late-night show last week, Bargatze revealed his plan for long acceptance speeches.
“Everybody gets 45 seconds to do all the thank yous,” he said. “So, what I came up with is I’m gonna donate $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Club. That’s what the show’s starting out with. Everybody does their 45 seconds. If someone goes over, we take away $1,000 a second. I know it’s tough. If you go under, we will put $1,000 back on so you can give it back.”
“It can cost a good bit,” Bargatze told Kimmel. “It could get wild. That means everybody gotta give their time up. If everybody gave it away it would be a ton of money. The ones that go long, that’s fine. Get me down to like 10 grand, alright?”
The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards are airing on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.
English (US)