If sense of humor is genetic, then Nate Bargatze’s got great genes.
Bargatze was not at his peak hosting Sunday’s Emmy Awards, but even a bad Bargatze is better than most stand-up comedians on their best night. His material was hit and miss, relying a bit too much on a fun fundraiser wrinkle. One unrelated joke was very miss — as in, most of us completely missed it.
“I have a blue jean tux on for some reason,” Bargatze said at a throwaway point about midway into the show and between awards presentations. “We had, like, a joke. There’s a cummerbund, and I forgot what it — I don’t know.”
He was, indeed, wearing blue jeans and a blue denim dinner jacket over a crisp white dress shirt with a blue denim bowtie and blue denim cummerbund — a real, true Canadian Tuxedo for the Nashville native.
“Alright, please welcome two-time Emmy nominee Sydney Sweeney,” Bargatze said.
Sweeney then took the stage in a formal red gown — a far better fashion choice — to present best supporting actor in a limited series. Owen Cooper, the recipient of the award as the 15-year-old star of Adolescence, immediately became the envy of all his mates — and only a little bit for the winning-an-Emmy part.
This particular Bargatze bit bumped me. It was just him, standing on stage in a weird (but not particularly outrageous) tuxedo, pointing out that he was in a weird tux. People wear weird shit to these things, so that in and of itself doesn’t really qualify this particular outfit as a sight gag.
A colleague, clearly more plugged in to fabric-based controversies than I, asked, “Was that [a] Sydney Sweeney joke? The jeans tux?”
My response, verbatim: “I don’t think so? Unless I missed some dialogue…”
She was right, I was wrong. Well, I was sort of wrong. Though I didn’t miss any dialogue, I do believe the joke was missing dialogue. That was by design, a person with knowledge of the bit told The Hollywood Reporter. Bargatze, an outspoken Christian who works squeaky clean, doesn’t degrade and doesn’t wade into controversy. The denim tux was him going there about Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle billboard and ad, in which the Hollywood “It” girl poses alone with the double entendre copy, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” Basically, some of the chronically-online found the message to be that only blonde-haired, blue-eyed white women have “great genes.”
The suit was the setup and the Sweeney intro was the punchline. What was spoken in the middle was simply Bargatze-patter — there wasn’t actually “a joke” he “forgot,” as he stated.
Unfortunately, the “joke” doesn’t stand on the visual itself. Bargatze was in a tux, while Sweeney, at her most denim-y, wore jeans and a jean jacket. Other versions of the ad dressed the Euphoria star in a white t-shirt or a white tank top and bleached jeans. Yes, Bargatze’s formal wear and Sweeney’s dressed-down modeling moment both featured denim-based outfits, but this side of cotton, denim is probably our most common textile — parody only works when the original work is recognizable within the spoof. Multiple people attending the awards show told me that they didn’t pick up on the joke, and a source who was backstage acknowledged a tepid response to the moment.
Sydney Sweeney stars in American Eagle’s fall 2025 campaign.
Courtesy of American Eagle
To call the joke “subtle,” as a number of my colleagues did, would be endorsing it for a level of cleverness and recognizability. Even with the info I have today, I cannot get on board with that classification. Not to overstate the importance of the moment, but a comedic cost-benefit analysis would probably conclude that, given what Bargatze had to work with, the risk of confusion outweighed its potential benefit. And as we all know, the best comedy comes out of economists’ tools.
For her part, Sweeney took to the stage with no acknowledgment of the moment and no interaction with Bargatze — not in a rude way, just in a doing-the-job way. Sweeney either didn’t catch the joke, didn’t hear it, or ignored it, which could have been her choice or a choice made for her for the sake of the joke.
Either way, the joke needed more — like, I don’t know, a joke?
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