Nate Bargatze Says He Didn’t Plan on Donating $250,000 to Boys & Girls Clubs for Emmys Bit

Nate Bargatze Says He Didn’t Plan on Donating $250,000 to Boys & Girls Clubs for Emmys Bit

Nate Bargatze proved to be a charitable, generous man at the 77th Emmy Awards — not that he especially planned to be.

The stand-up comic said on his Nateland podcast that he never planned on donating $250,000 of his own money to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, as he did at the end of the Emmys.

“I had it in my head one way. It kind of came out another way, but — the reasoning was there,” Bargatze said of the running gag. “I wasn’t gonna give that money at the end, like, I wasn’t thinking I was gonna have to. But the way it went, I was like, ‘I can’t — I’m not gonna not …’”

The bit went like this: Bargatze, while opening the live awards show, pledged $100,000 of his own money to the Boys & Girls Clubs. Awesome. Even awesome-r, for every tick under 45 seconds a winner’s acceptance speech lasted, Bargatze would add another $1,000 from his own pocket. However, for every second over 45 seconds a winner went, he’d deduct $1,000 from the running tally. The bank ended up quite a bit in the red.

Bargatze says CBS had specifically asked him to come up with a way to keep acceptance speeches tight. CBS “loved” what he came up with, Bargatze said, as did “everyone at home.”

You know who didn’t? “A lot of the reviews,” Bargatze acknowledged.

Shameless plug here for me being among the few in the media to defend the bit. (That said, it sounds like I was wrong about Bargatze preplanning to cover the overages personally. Whether he wanted to or had to, in the end, he did the right thing.)

Bargatze saw this thing going a whole ‘nother way.

“I thought it was gonna be, I dunno, Netflix donating, or Apple,” Bargatze said on Nateland’s 271st episode. “If someone was giving these long speeches, I just thought they could be like, ‘and Netflix is gonna cover my overage.’”

“In my head, I pictured they could then go long, but then be a hero,” he said. “But I think I could have explained it more, to be honest.”

And he almost did. Bargatze said he “almost sent an email out” ahead of the show to explain the game and what he hoped to accomplish with it. A good idea, in hindsight.