Nate: A One Man Show Is Outrageous, Provocative and Unforgettable
Images courtesy of Netflix
If you can’t tell by the photo above, Nate Palomino isn’t a real person. It’s the male alter ego of Natalie Palamides, a comedian and performer who’s probably best known in America for playing Flo’s bored, cynical co-worker Mara in those Progressive ads. In her award-winning live show Nate: A One Man Show, Palamides uses Nate to explore the tricky issues of rape and consent, while parodying alpha male braggadocio. It’s one of the bravest, weirdest, most striking comedy performances you’ll ever see, and Netflix’s taped version mostly captures what makes it so special.
After the one major off note of the whole show—a prologue of audience members and producer Amy Poehler preparing / warning the viewers at home what’s about to happen—Nate begins as a pure cartoon of masculine excess. Palamides storms the stage with smoke and pyro, blasting heavy metal and crushing cans, and immediately pulling the audience onto the stage by trying to do an Evel Knievel-style stunt over a viewer. Nate is an absurd, clownish refraction of a man—Palamides wears a bushy wig with headband, a big floppy mustache, fake chest hair, baggy camo pants, and a plaid lumberjack coat with no shirt underneath—and this entrance makes us expect a show right out of the “Stone Cold” Steve Austin playbook.
When the bluster dies down, we realize Nate isn’t the power bro he wants to be. He’s haggard, beaten, with a black eye and bandages around his neck. He competes with the audience in a rigged drinking game, but the cans in his cooler are La Croix and not Coors Light. His terms that the winner gets to do anything they want to anybody in the audience they want are as crudely sexual as they sound, but before groping any of the women in the crowd he asks for their consent first. And then, for good measure, he fondles a man, as well.
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