Nate Bargatze recalls having trouble hearing the laughter while taping his Netflix standup special for a mask-wearing audience

The Daily Beast

"It was the end of October. And everybody had to get tested," he says of his The Greatest Average American special, which dropped on Netflix this week. "The audience had to get tested. It was only a hundred people. They all had to wear masks the whole show, social distance. It was at Universal Studios, outside there. Troy Miller, the director, did a really good job making it look like a lot of people were there." Bargatze adds: "Because they had masks on and I can’t hear their laughs—and I got kind of used to not hearing their laughs, but when I can’t see their faces, I can’t even see them smile." So the crew had to put mics on all the tables and a monitor near Bargatze so he could hear the laughs for his second show taping. "And then I had to slow down," he says. "It’s just so funny, because if you’re in a theater sometimes something that could take 40 minutes can take an hour. And then sometimes, something that could take an hour, if you're in a weird situation, you can tell it all in 40 minutes. It just really depends on just the energy of the crowd. And the crowd was amazing, but the scenario that we’re in, you can't do it. So the second show I was very aware that I needed to do more time and we put that in. I just kind of tried to keep my pace a little bit slower. So that’s what we did."