5 Reasons Nathan For You Is The Best Comedy Of The 2010s (& 5 It’s Not)

5 Reasons Nathan For You Is The Best Comedy Of The 2010s (& 5 It’s Not)

Nathan for You is a documentary-style comedy hosted by Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder. Is it possibly the best comedy of the decade?

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Imagine owning a burger joint and hiring a marketing consultant to give you some tips on how to bring in more customers. The consultant suggests you offer $100 to anyone who doesn’t think your burgers are the best in town, resulting in long queues of customers eager to challenge your claims for a crisp new hundo. This kind of half-brained suggestion is at the heart of Comedy Central’s Nathan for You, a documentary-style comedy hosted by Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder between 2013 and 2017.

In each episode, Fielder pitches absurd business plans to willing participants under the guise of giving them an advantage over their competition. Through this premise, Fielder parodies reality television, digs into the current state of consumerism, and puts his finger on the pulse of American business. Is Nathan For You the ultimate comedic expression of the 2010s, or is it just another satire that will fall to the wayside? Read below and decide for yourself.

10 Not: The Show Gets Uncomfortable Really, Really Fast

Putting everyday people in the strange circumstances conceived of by Fielder and his crew can often lead to very, very disturbing television. In the second season, Fielder tells a Los Angeles realtor that one way to make a name for herself in an oversaturated industry is to be rebranded as The Ghost Realtor. She agrees, claiming to be the only realtor who can assure potential homebuyers her properties are totally ghost-free.

When a YouTube psychic senses an evil presence is one of her homes, a YouTube exorcist performs a cleansing ritual. During the ceremony, he expels some bad juju from the realtor, who has a complete emotional and physical breakdown. The entire sequence is caught on screen, and it makes for a cringe-inducing experience. In Fielder’s defense, the realtor kept her new image after the episode aired, and she’s used it to sell quite a few homes since.

9 Best: It Pokes Fun At The Self-Help Business Guru

Nathan For You is at its best when Fielder puts himself in the middle of the absurdity, making false claims about his expertise and playing the part of a reality television business guru. Cable networks are flooded with shows involving get rich quick schemes, business revamps, and self-proclaimed marketing masters.

With every episode, Fielder criticizes the claims made by the reality television hosts he parodies with his doltish plans. Whether it’s offering a gas rebate that only be cashed in on the top of a mountain or implementing a no-sharing policy at a movie theater, Fielder is ready to ruin any and every legitimate business model.

8 Not: Fielder Overplays The Lonely, Awkward White Male Trope

A running thread throughout the series is that Fielder is a friendless, lonely 30-something white male desirous of friendship and companions. Unfortunately, he’s way too awkward and anxious to make them, often saying or doing inappropriate things. This trope is pretty overplayed at this point, and it reaches its climax on Nathan For You in the third season.

Fielder attempts to make friends by posting an ad on CraigsList, connecting with a man new to Los Angeles who is also lonely. In other episodes, Fielder has strange interactions with women, demonstrating his inability to know how to develop romantic relationships.

7 Best: It Digs Into The Current State Of American Economics

One of the best episodes in the show is when Fielder takes on the rideshare service Uber with the help of a taxi driver named Andy. The pair organize a ski-mask wearing cell of operatives who infiltrate Uber with plans to take it down from the inside and eliminate the competition for taxi drivers.

Things don’t go as planned, but the episode shows how services like Uber have been able to eradicate an entire way of life for taxi drivers across the world by providing cheaper costs and stream-lined, app-based service. The catch, however, also highlighted on the show, is that drivers don’t have the security and consistency of being real employees; they are just independent contractors.

6 Not: Sometimes, It Revels In Commercialism

At times, it’s hard to gauge whether Fielder loves consumer culture or hates it. He uses the iconography and success of the coffee chain Starbucks to convince a business owner to rebrand his coffee establishment as a Dumb Starbucks. They decide to hold a press conference, and the stunt went viral, providing international publicity for the show.

Fielder later claimed he didn’t intend to get mainstream attention for the store, but that excuse seems a bit fishy in retrospect. Either way, it’s hard to see what this kind of antic does for the overarching themes in the series.

5 Best: It Shows How Far People Will Go For Recognition

In the first season, Fielder creates a fake reality television show in line with The Bachelor in order to put an end to his love troubles. He plays up the doltish, nerdy nincompoop who has no idea how to talk to women, which is pretty boring and overdone on its own.

What’s brilliant about this episode, though, is that it shows what the female contestants will do in order to win his affections. Believing they will be featured on a television dating show, the women take every chance they can to plug themselves and their creative ventures.

4 Not: It Has A Tendency To Border On Exploitative

Sometimes, Fielder takes his skits and plans too far, involving real people in a complicated, layered satire that obviously goes way above their heads. In the infamous gas rebate episode, quite a few people decide to follow Fielder up a mountain in order to cash in their paperwork and get their dollar off each gallon purchased. Even with his absurd and circular clues and puzzles, designed to get contestants to drop like flies, three people remain at the end.

While the episode makes a profound statement about the lack of genuine connection in the real world, it also puts the folks being filmed in vulnerable situations. They open up about their personal lives in ways they may not have if they’d been aware of Fielder’s true intentions.

3 Best: Nathan Fielder Never Breaks Character

With every episode, no matter the content, characters, or accusations he faces, Fielder never breaks character. He always remains calm, aloof, and supposedly dedicated to his craft. This ability to stay on point at all times is one of the reasons the show works so well.

As the show progressed, and as Fielder became more recognizable, it was difficult for the series to provide both original content and keep people from realizing they are being spoofed. Like Sasha Baron Cohen’s Ali G or Borat, Nathan Fielder’s character on the show is the kind that can comes with a limited shelf-life.

2 Not: The Stunts Pulled By Fielder’s Crew Can Be Way Too Goofy

Nathan For You struggles at times to appeal to audiences who prefer stupid, gallows humor over intellectually acute social commentary. In attempts to garner laughs from both extremes of the comedy-loving spectrum, the stunts put together by Fielder’s crew will sometimes totally fall apart.

In the show’s very first episode, Fielder suggests a yogurt shop offer a poop-flavored option. In another, he builds an elaborate bodysuit in order to smuggle chilli into a baseball game. The resulting gross-out scenes take away from the episodes’ ability to effectively dig into contemporary economics.

1 Best: It’s A Brilliant Satire Of Contemporary Cable Television

Despite its flaws, Nathan For You is an important satire that digs into the nature of contemporary television. From audiences who expect quick action and over-the-top scenarios to television executives who only care about making money, Nathan For You implicates them all.

Another outcome of Nathan For You is that it demonstrates how manipulative and callous reality television shows can be with their focus on watching people fail in various contexts. Nathan For You, without losing its comedic edge, asks for something better out of mainstream television.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/nathan-for-you-best-comedy-reasons-for-against/

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