Why ‘Nathan For You’ Is The Most Interesting Show On TV (And What It Can Teach Us About Comedy)

When they began directing commercials for GE and embarking on international tours, it was tempting to regard Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim as sellouts, as if their new mass-appeal compromised their avant-gardism. After all, the creators of the stomach-unsettlingly weird Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! were famous for comedy that mocked American cable-access TV by exaggerating it to grotesque proportions, in uncomfortable sketches about dads, child clowns and something called bub-bubs.

But Tim and Eric’s popularity has disturbed the longstanding division between alternative and mainstream taste in comedy. The shift of this alternative sensibility from the margins of culture to its centre has also allowed more space for conceptual idiosyncrasy and plain weirdness on TV. A few recent examples, mostly produced by smaller American networks, come to mind, including IFC’s Portlandia and Documentary Now!; FX’s Louie and Archer; and Netflix’s Bojack Horseman. Perhaps the weirdest and most interesting of this bunch, though, is Nathan for You, whose third season is currently airing on Comedy Central (but not, sadly, in the digital wasteland that is Australia).

Produced by Tim and Eric’s own Abso Lutely Productions, Nathan for You has a very simple premise: in each episode, Nathan Fielder, a self-styled business expert, seeks to improve the fortunes of a struggling American small business with an offbeat commercial strategy. In one early episode, Nathan tries to generate publicity for a Californian petting zoo by producing a viral video of a pig saving a goat from drowning. In this case, the strategy is a success; that video has amassed over nine million views on YouTube, and was featured—as Fielder delights in telling us—on news programs around the world.

But Fielder is probably most famous for a stunt in which he exploited loosely-defined US parody law to rebrand an ailing LA coffee shop as a ‘Dumb Starbucks’, selling ‘Dumb’—that is, free—versions of popular Starbucks items.

Because of episodes like ‘Dumb Starbucks’, and because the show pivots on the sometimes-desperate existence of small business in a globalised corporate world, Nathan for You is often described as anti-capitalist satire, with its comic appeal trading on the gruesome excesses of big business and the absurd personalities of the little guys who struggle against it. But though it is an easy show to pitch, it is very difficult to recap: each episode is so conceptually intricate, and layered with so many schemes (and sub-schemes), that any attempt to do so quickly trails off into nonsense.

A recent episode from season three—beginning with a plot to improve business at a small-time electronics retailer by taking advantage of Best Buy’s price-match policy—eventually involves an alligator, a class-action lawsuit, an insanity plea, a room full of fake jurors and a strategy to gather evidence by inventing a reality television show called Retail Dating, all in 22 minutes. As a result, the experience of watching Nathan for You is often dizzying. Nathan’s gift for logical sleight-of-hand, combined with the wild complexity of his ideas, means that the show is never just simple satire or reality-TV genre parody.

The Two Nathans: Personality Vs Comedy

Many critics writing about Nathan for You make a sensible distinction between Nathan Fielder the comedian (and creator of spectacular YouTube content), and ‘Nathan’, his creation and on-screen persona. One recurrent subplot of the show, for example, is Nathan’s desperate, grasping quest for a girlfriend. Incapacitated, but not inhibited, by awkwardness, Nathan compulsively asks every one of his clients about their experiences with love and sex, unafraid to make brazen propositions of romance. Watching the show, it seems obvious that this, probably, is not how Fielder conducts himself in real life. But his commitment to character—along with his heroic ability to maintain a straight face—unsettles our ability to make a clean distinction between the comic and the character he plays.

Fielder, like Tim and Eric, is indebted to the work of American comedian Andy Kaufman, who unsettled audience expectations about what a comedy routine could and should be. As his well-known character, the Foreign Man—a nervous, indeterminately European performer—a typical bit would see Kaufman getting on stage and singing out of key for ten minutes, or doing a series of poor impressions before breaking into a sharply accurate Elvis impersonation.

To the generation of comedians who would follow him, Kaufman made uncertainty available as a technique. Probably the strangest footage of Kaufman comes from his appearances on Letterman in the 1980s, in which he would not tell jokes at all, but simply narrate long, meandering stories about his own life. The key moment in this clip comes when Kaufman explicitly instructs the audience that he’s not trying to be funny or tell a joke, but they laugh nonetheless.

Fielder’s own awkward appearances on the late-night talk-show circuit play like outtakes from his show. In the US, the late-night show—historically, the domain of white men with names like Letterman and Leno—is a rigid, rehearsed affair, offering celebrities an opportunity to promote their work and ingratiate themselves to the public; to prove, that is, that they are a real human person. However, Fielder’s failure to respond to the tropes of late-night TV indicates that his comedy, like Kaufman’s, actually depends on the suspension of personality.

The fact that Fielder’s real personality is so disguised tells us a lot about how his comedy works. The perception of a real human person is required for a joke to function. Comedy, like political rhetoric, depends on the implicit knowledge that, despite whatever offences may be incurred, the real person behind the jokes basically thinks the same way that you do. When you go to a club, say, to see a comedian’s routine, you allow them to speak on your behalf. This is part of the reason why moral outrage is so common to comedians and audiences alike, and why it’s so difficult to talk about. When Amy Schumer was recently accused of having a ‘race problem’, she tweeted, “Just stick with me and trust that I’m joking“.

In Nathan for You, Fielder puts this ambiguity to work, leaving the audience unsure of whose side he’s on, or even whether he’s funny at all. Fielder’s comic style, as with all alt-comedy, seems to be built on Andy Kaufman’s realisation that the failure to be funny is itself funny. Awkwardness, pauses, bad jokes, and poor stagecraft are essential to alt-comedy, and to Fielder’s shtick. In fact, Nathan’s total lack of social skills is often what allows him to coerce so many unwitting small-business owners to participate in his show.

Business Innovation Made (More) Ridiculous

In the same way that mass-production and the industrial revolution created an entrepreneurial cohort of inventors promoting crazy inventions like the cigarette umbrella and the monowheel, the digital revolution has produced a legion of independent tech-crusaders rhapsodising about agility and innovation. In the ’20s and ’30s, American cartoonist Rube Goldberg published a very popular series of comic strips satirising these inventors. His comics depicted unnecessarily complex machines designed to complete very simple tasks, like flicking a switch or turning a page, that are so impractical they approach ridiculousness.

There are plenty of examples on YouTube of Rube Goldbergs, along with their Japanese counterpart, known as ‘Pitagora Suichi,’ or Pythagoras Switch. But Goldberg’s legacy is still discernible today in board games like Mouse Trap, or that OK GO music video with the paint.

Like a Rube Goldberg machine, Nathan’s plans for business innovation expand a simple task into a complex and hilarious labyrinth of smaller ones. ‘The Movement’, a recent episode from season three, is a typical example. Nathan pitches a dubious idea to a small house-moving company: What if they could extract free labour from their customers by presenting moving as a new exercise fad called “The Movement”? To promote it, Nathan hires a semi-professional bodybuilder named Jack Garbarino to pretend that The Movement is responsible for his physique, and that he’s “never set foot in a gym in his life”. This is a problem, because Garbarino spends every single day in the gym. To combat this, Nathan provides Garbarino with a makeshift workout space inside a storage locker, so that he can avoid the public gym and escape detection. Meanwhile, Nathan finds a writer on Craigslist to quickly draft a false memoir in Garbarino’s name, describing his journey to fitness using The Movement. The book, which has become an Amazon bestseller, features sentences like this:

My favorite chapter from The Movement book pic.twitter.com/QzxIVmjuj7

— nathan fielder (@nathanfielder) October 30, 2015

Ultimately, ‘The Movement’ diverges so far from its original premise that when Nathan finally reports back to the manager of the moving company at the end of the episode—after a string of promotional morning-TV appearances involving false recollections of, among other things, Garbarino’s childhood friendship with Steve Jobs—any possible benefit to the business seems redundant, and, laughing, we wonder how we got here.

In a recent statement that surprised no professional philosophers anywhere, American comedian Pete Holmes suggested that “comedians are the modern-day philosophers”, whose job it is to make sense of culture. Despite this, comedy—particularly stand-up—lacks a convincing critical tradition, and is often regarded as trivial entertainment that can’t be thoughtfully discussed. But if a show as weird, overcomplicated and artful as Nathan for You proves anything, it’s that comedy is art. Among the many things to recommend it, Nathan for You is interesting precisely because its formal sophistication presents an opportunity to talk about what comedy is, and what it can do.

 

Season three of Nathan For You airs on Comedy Central in the States. Do with that information what you will.

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Joshua Barnes is a writer from Melbourne. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kill Your Darlings, The Point, Voiceworks and All The Best Radio, and he tweets from @j___barnes