Nate Bargatze considered squeezing a big, dumb joke into his command for drivers to start their engines at the Daytona 500.
“At first, I thought about doing like, how many feet are in 500 miles,” Bargatze said. “Nobody knows.”
Bargatze laughed when he said the proposed joke, which is a riff on his popular “Washington’s Dream” sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” fell flat when he tested it Saturday night during a gig in Indianapolis.
“I was going to do another one with Jimmie Johnson being older to let the younger drivers know that his left blinker will be on the whole race,” Bargatze said. “Then when I got here and talked about it, it’s like, I think you just need to do, normal? You have all these hopes and dreams to do something funny.”
Bargatze kept it straight in his role as grand marshal for Sunday’s Daytona 500.
“It’s going to be insanity,” Bargatze said. “It’s been a dream to be asked to do this.”
Bargatze’s day at Daytona — where he mingled with drivers such as Denny Hamlin — is just the latest dream job for one of the most popular stand-ups currently working. He hosted the Emmy Awards, released three Netflix specials and just won a Best Comedy Album Grammy Award for “Your Friend, Nate Bargatze.”
His “Big Dumb Eyes World Tour” set a record for biggest one-year gross by a comedy performer in history and has set more than 40 arena attendance records.
They served as warm-up acts for his first starring role in a movie, “The Breadwinner.” Bargatze co-wrote the script for the film he said was influenced by his stand-up and old-school funny, family movies such as “Mr. Mom” and “Home Alone.”
“You want it to be broad, the whole family can come,” Bargatze said. “It’s like what I do with stand-up, you kind of just want everybody to come.”
Mandy Moore plays Bargatze’s wife in the comedy, which also includes Colin Jost and Will Forte and opens May 29.
“Obviously overwhelming,” Bargatze said. “I don’t know how to act. Learning that on the fly was a good time.”
The 46-year-old Bargatze resumes his stand-up tour this week in Rockford, Illinois, and he’s set to host the ABC game show, “The Greatest Average American.”
The title seemed fitting when Bargatze was gifted one of only 500 specialty Daytona 500 hats. The hat was numbered 302. Average.
“It’s not bragging,” Bargatze said. “I’m right in the middle. That’s where the average American would be. It’s humility. It’s how you go.”
___
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
