We’ve seen a lot of amazing television over the past year, and the 2025 TV schedule is about to bring us the industry celebration that will award some of the shows when the Emmys air on September 14. Obviously, everyone will be rooting on their favorite nominees, but fans will also be on hand to check out what is sure to be a wide variety of acceptance speeches. Host Nate Bargatze already has a rather high-stakes plan to keep everyone’s speech short, but I’m curious about whether or not he’s really going to go through with it.
What Is Emmy Host Nate Bargatze’s Plan To Keep Speeches Short?
Those who know comedian Nate Bargatze’s funny but folksy everyman quality understand that he’s got a self-deprecating nature on stage that makes it easy to like him. While those things mean that he’s likely to be a great Emmy host (he certainly shined while hosting SNL in Season 49), we all know that being the master of ceremonies where a lot of famous people are going to be super excited when they win is no small feat.
When appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! recently, Bargatze opened up about his prep work for the big night, and said:
When they told me I was doing this, they were like, ‘Look, if you can come up with a way to keep everybody’s thank yous to a minimum.’ So, everybody gets 45 seconds to do all the thank yous. So what I came up with is I'm going to donate $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Club.
Nice, right? Well, as the comedian quickly added once the audience began cheering and applauding, “maybe hang on a second.” While this is definitely a cool move to try and keep every winner to their time limit, there are some conditions, especially seeing as how Bargatze is, apparently, putting up all that cash all on his own. He continued:
That's what the show's starting at. When everybody uses their 45 seconds, if someone goes over, we take away $1,000 a second every time they go over. So, I know, it’s tough.
Part way through this explanation, the comedian’s plan elicited shocked groans and laughter, which led to his admission that the plan was “tough.” Who would dare take donations away from a solid, long-standing charity like the Boys & Girls Club?! Honestly, I think he’d probably quickly pin a lower donation on every award-winner who dared to go over their 45 seconds, and though he came up with this idea…he wouldn’t be totally wrong. Plus, there’s more to it:
If you go under, we will put a $1,000 back on. So you can give it back!
This led to more cheers and grateful applause, because everyone wants a good cause to get as much money as possible, right? Over the years, we’ve seen a number of heartfelt speeches from the likes of Jamie Foxx at the BET Awards, John Oliver’s A+ words at last year’s Emmys, where he started to be played off by the orchestra and directed a “fuck you” to the musicians. It’s understandable that winners can, sometimes, enter a bit of a fugue state when they get on stage (Regina King compared her Oscar win to smoking weed for the first time), and trying to thank everyone who’s ever helped them while keeping it under 45 seconds is a herculean task.
While this seems like a solid idea, Bargatze’s delivery of the news really doesn’t add a lot of credence to the thought that he’s really, actually going to do this (especially when he notes that some young members of the Boys & Girls Club will be attending so that speech-givers will “have to look them in the face.” Kimmel even inquired about the truthfulness of this supposed plan, but the funny man tried to make it clear that his intentions are real:
That’s why we did the add-on, because I was thinking everybody would think this is a joke if we just took away [money]. But this is as real as it gets…I swear.
Look, I cannot wait to see how the Emmy audience responds when he explains how all of this will go down, and what kind of potential chaos it leads to as the night goes on.
