COLLEGE GROVE, Tenn. -- Nate Bargatze loves fast food. He loves big-box stores and the suburbs and TNT marathons of Die Hard. He finds felicity in the familiar, comfort in the caloric, originality in the ordinary.

"I had McDonald's last night," he says while golfing on a chilly November morning at the Troubadour, an exclusive club and private community where he is building a house for his family.

The man with pedestrian tastes has joked his way to a fancy station in life. His rider for arena gigs requires the venue to provide Titleist Pro V1 golf balls. He loves the pit stop around the Troubadour's fifth hole: a cottage filled with every temptation you can imagine, such as jars of candy, a bar with top-shelf liquor, a drawer of fried chicken sandwiches with pimento cheese. He points to the soft-serve bar and seems slightly disappointed when no one makes a homemade version of a Blizzard, the Dairy Queen treat.

Yet, right now, he is among the best in stand-up comedy, or at least among the most successful. During the past seven years, Bargatze has catapulted from clubs to arenas, from gigs on late-night TV to hosting "Saturday Night Live." He used to be niche: the favorite comedian of your favorite comedian. Now he's a household name, drawing whole families to his PG-rated shows.

His comic kindling is everyday American absurdities and how they provoke anxiety. We don't eat healthily enough. We don't read enough. We have access to everything, but we never feel like we're enough. Onstage, he revels in his bad habits, his utter inadequacy, and we laugh because we recognize ourselves. It's a nifty trick: Our private shames become his comfort comedy, and therefore our salvation -- or at least the psychological equivalent of a No. 1 with a Diet Coke at McDonald's.

"DoorDash is what's going to kill me," he said during his SNL monologue Oct. 5, beginning a bit that he'd first tried out eight months earlier, on fellow comics backstage at Capital One Arena in Washington. "I mean, I don't know who I think I am."

He described how he once ordered McDonald's, then tacked on a Blizzard. The delivery app assigned two different drivers, putting Bargatze in a very modern predicament that would expose his -- our -- profound laziness.

"Now I'm, like, watching the GPS, and I'm like, 'They're gonna come at the same time,'" Bargatze said. It's "my worst nightmare. ... I mean, I see 'em both. They both make the turn at the same time; I'm mortified. The McDonald's comes in, drops it off. Dairy Queen has to let him back out."

Bargatze is affable and goofy on the golf course. His swing is off today -- the worst that comes out of his mouth is, "Gol-ly!" -- and he blames his restless mind and packed schedule. He's 45 and busier than ever. He has to record a multi-hour podcast today, and he's trying out new material tonight at Zanies, the Nashville comedy club that has become his home base. Tomorrow is filled with Zoom meetings for his production company, whose name belies his self-deprecating shtick: Nateland, a term borrowed from a New York comic friend's term for Middle America.

Bargatze has a collection of essays coming out in May. He has two specials airing over the next week: his third Netflix special, on Dec. 24, (typical for a stand-up comic) and a Christmas variety show on CBS on Thursday (unusual for a stand-up comic).

He seems most excited about being on CBS. His goal is to be as macro and mainstream as network TV.

"No one wants to be Walmart," Bargatze says, sitting in a golf cart next to the green on the seventh hole. "I want to be Walmart."

Reliable, in other words. Familiar as a suburb. His jokes are about buying milk, about marriage, about tee times. He doesn't talk about politics or sex or really anything topical -- either onstage or during our interviews -- because he doesn't want to cause anyone a nanosecond of true discomfort.

Modern stand-up comedy was born of discomfort. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were arrested for their aggressive assaults on propriety in the mid-20th century. Bargatze admires the pioneers. But ...

"When George Carlin was around, you needed George Carlin," Bargatze says. "You needed Lenny Bruce."

Now? Bargatze thinks we need something else. So he doesn't push the envelope. He pulls it. He pulls it back over us like a security blanket. And this nation seems eager to be tucked in.

Bargatze was introduced early to showbiz through his father, a working magician. Bargatze was the class clown in high school, but Nashville, where he grew up lower-middle class, didn't have stand-ups hitting it big in honky-tonks. He dropped out of community college and worked various blue-collar jobs, such as delivering mattresses and hosting and serving at Applebee's, where he met his wife.

He's loved comedy ever since childhood, when he heard Sinbad riff on TV about people getting to the front of a McDonald's line and not knowing what to order. "They got the same menu!" was Sinbad's exasperated punch line. It was the first time Bargatze heard a comedian using parts of life he recognized.

Bargatze knew that he wanted to do this, but he didn't know how. So when a buddy decided to move to Chicago to attend Second City, the improv comedy school, Bargatze enrolled as well.

"I just kind of needed someone to say, 'I'm gonna go there,'" he says. "And I'm like, 'All right, I'll go with you.'"

He took stand-up classes after realizing that improv wasn't his bag, and he began curating his own curriculum: watching comedians as if they were his professors. Jerry Seinfeld's autobiographical documentary, "Comedian," inspired Bargatze to move to New York in 2004.

Bargatze loved Seinfeld's material -- the minutiae of everyday life -- but diverged from his delivery, which was precise, bordering on the mathematical. Instead, Bargatze was inspired by the looseness of Bill Burr and Patrice O'Neal. They seemed to be figuring out their bits onstage, in the moment. This aesthetic worked for Bargatze, whose natural cadence fumbles and pauses, and leads him down winding sentences that he often doesn't finish.

"I had a voice that was already set," he says. "I was going to have to play with that voice, because I sound like I sound."

That sound was different for New York clubs of the early 2000s, when comics like Burr, O'Neal and Louis C.K. were flourishing. Bargatze loaded FedEx trucks from 5 to 10 a.m. after dutifully climbing onstage nearly every night for nearly a decade, watching comics pass him by who were more profane, more inflammatory or political.

"The landscape of comedy was that 9 out of 10 comedians were going to be kind of rough," says Pete Holmes, who handed out club fliers with Bargatze at the beginning of their careers. "The style was you shock them and kick them in the balls."

Bargatze didn't mention balls, much less kick them. He wondered whether he should dirty up his act, but he decided to stay true to his own voice. For years, his following was ardent but specific.

"Canadians and college kids always loved me and Nate," Holmes says, but New York audiences mostly craved aggression. Every once in a while, Holmes says, the audience grew weary of jokes about "finding the G spot," and that meant he and Bargatze were "a breath of fresh air, a gear shift."

Nate is doing now what he did then. "He hasn't changed," Holmes says.

So what did? Maybe the country was just ready for a gear shift.

And maybe Bargatze began to grow into the place where his comedy always existed. Middle America began to meet middle age. Over time, he quit drinking, lost weight, began dressing better, figured out his haircut and left New York for Los Angeles.

In 2013, Jimmy Fallon caught one of his sets and invited him on "Late Night," where Bargatze joked about his daughter's birth 10 months earlier.

"They should have probably kept her, 'cause I was like: 'How much do you feed it? I bet it's a lot,'" Bargatze says. "It sounded like I was buying a hamster at a pet store."

In 2017, Bargatze released a half-hour special as part of a Netflix series called "The Standups." The set was standard Bargatze material, but now his audience was the some 100 million subscribers Netflix had at the time, at the dawn of the Trump era, in which envelope-pushing started to become mind-numbing.

After "The Standups" came out, Bargatze performed in Spokane, Washington, and, for the first time, the audience knew his jokes. Over the next few years, Netflix aired two full hour-long specials from Bargatze, and, in an ever-noisier world, his quietude attracted more and more attention. He never really made headlines, but he caught the eye of headliners. Fallon, John Mulaney and Pete Davidson recommended him to Lorne Michaels, who finally invited him to host when the 2023 actors strike created a dearth of options.

When he first took the SNL stage, in October 2023, Bargatze knew that most viewers wouldn't recognize him. "I'm as shocked as you are that I'm here," he said at the start of his monologue.

But SNL writers had written the perfect sketch for him: Gen. George Washington envisioning a new nation that would be free -- to choose its own system of weights and measurements.

"I dream that, one day, our proud nation will measure weights in pounds and that 2,000 pounds shall be called 'a ton,'" a bewigged Bargatze said, with stilted majesty.

"And what will 1,000 pounds be called, sir?" asked one of his soldiers.

"Nothing," Bargatze replied flatly.

The sketch, which has racked up more than 16 million views on YouTube, was the perfect marriage of his languid delivery and America's mundane grandiosity.

SNL writer Streeter Seidell and cast member Mikey Day had kicked around the sketch idea for a while, waiting for the right host to pull it off.

"I truly only think that would have worked so well with Nate," Day says, adding: "The dead-eyed stare that he did is just so perfect -- A, for George Washington, and B, just stating these dumb facts. It was just kismet."

And, Bargatze says, it shot his career "into another world."

Playing George Washington, and talking about liters and gallons, is as political as Nate Bargatze gets.

"I actually enjoy politics," he says from the driver's seat of the golf cart. "I don't talk about them, but I enjoy them. I don't think it's what people are coming to me for."

Sometimes, he wants to talk politics onstage. Sometimes, he feels like he should. But then he thinks about why he's gotten so popular: His audience trusts him not to go there.

"The battle is not with other people but with myself," he says. "I've got to fight myself. It's easy to feel self-important. ... I don't have a crazy take, ever. So I don't get the quick hits a lot of comics get."

The Nateland Company might sound like a kingdom of self-importance, but he insists that it will only be a place of clean, apolitical fun.

A guidepost for Nateland content: "We're starting at PG, but you can talk me into PG-13."

At the moment, it mostly consists of his podcast, some live comedy nights and a few production credits. It's based in Nashville, where he hopes to make a farm system for young comics. He plans to produce movies and TV shows; Bargatze hired Adrian Kulp, a former development executive for Happy Madison, Adam Sandler's production company.

Bargatze envisions Nateland much like a Walmart: an overarching structure split into different sections with a cornucopia of content that appeals to all ages and backgrounds.

Nateland's tagline is, "Good, clean, funny." But Bargatze's production ambitions extend beyond comedy. Why not apply "clean" to different movie genres?

Horror? "Let's just not show someone's bones," Bargatze says.

Romantic comedy? "We've had a lot of sex scenes in movies," he says. "There's not much left on the table."

He rattles off genre taglines that pull the envelope.

"Good, clean, scary." "Good, clean, dramatic." "Good, clean, action."

Says Bill Burr: "There's people that work clean that are absolute cornballs, that sound like they're doing comedy from 40 years ago. Then there's guys like Nate, whose jokes are so good, you don't realize he's working clean."

The appeal of Walmart is predictability. The key to comedy is unpredictability. Bargatze tries to straddle the line: safe but delightful, familiar but not boring.

"I'm 44. My daughter's 11," he said during his first SNL monologue. "When she's my age, it'll be 2057. I don't even believe that's a real year. My movies didn't go that high in fake years. How am I gonna talk to someone from 2057? I have more in common with a pilgrim."

His most recent SNL episode, broadcast a month before the election, started with a cold-open sketch about the vice-presidential debate: topical, satirical, ripped from the headlines with cast members and guests mocking Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Tim Walz and JD Vance.

Bargatze's monologue followed right after. He talked about ... community college. And how he can't pronounce "oil." And fast food, of course.

"It's just going to be me being dumb," he says of his comedy, "and you can laugh with me or laugh at me."

"Your Friend, Nate Bargatze," his new Netflix special, is more of the same. He jokes about feeling like an exemplary husband because he does his own laundry, feeling inadequate next to a surgeon at career day at his daughter's school, and the illogical duty of having to help guard his Tennessee suburb's water tanks after 9/11. The special is so family-friendly that his preteen daughter introduces him to the crowd, which is filled with young and old.

"My specials are rated PG," Bargatze says. "One of them was rated G. I'll be honest with you: It is a little embarrassing."

But it's what he's going for, and it's personified by the front row during a recent show: one entire family, granddaughter to grandparent, all safe and snug in Nateland.