Bernie Sanders and the Anti-Capitalist Comedy of Nathan For You

In what must be, by now, my third or fourth time rewatching Nathan Fielder’s Comedy Central series Nathan For You as I excitedly await its upcoming fourth season, I noticed something interesting.

In the show, Fielder mockingly plays the role of a business consultant with “really good grades” (the intro sets a transcript littered with Bs and Cs to sweeping, orchestral music) who travels around Los Angeles helping struggling businesses with hare-brained schemes, from valet parking at a nail salon to a complicated system of helium balloons and a scarecrow-carrying drone that allows the morbidly obese to go on pony treks.

Usually these real-life owners will agree to these madcap plans, even if they’re uneasy about it, and Fielder meets with them after in his deadpan, awkward business prodigy persona to go over just how great his idea was. After my third or fourth watch of some of my favourite episodes, I noticed that Fielder is extraordinarily convincing both in getting these small business owners to agree to his insane ideas and even in getting them to say the ideas were good and they may try them again, even if their strained facial expressions present an entirely different story.

Nathan For You makes for such great television because its creators really know and love bad television. The stylistic choices of the show brilliantly mimic reality television; from the ‘business improvement’ reality shows it is most directly aping, such as Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares series, even down to a spoof reality show within the show about a security guard who finds himself rendered into a paralysis by the sight of women with large chests. But there seems to be an intelligence among Fielder and the production crew of issues beyond the careful mise-en-scene of your average episode of the Kardashians. The more I watch Nathan For You, the more I realise just how much of its dry wit is really more the chuckle that erupts from a burning pit of rage and, in an America ready to make Donald Trump the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, you better believe there’s a lot of anger out there.

The more you look at Fielder’s outrageous character (filled with boundless confidence in his own bizarre ideas, lacking the ability to emotionally connect with anyone in a meaningful way, constantly goading you into accepting his warped reality just by his sheer, dogged insistence), the more you realise that Nathan mightn’t fit in on Main Street, but there’s a decent chance he could slot into the world of Wall Street.

Essays upon essays have been written about the emotional disconnect often preferable in the high flying world of Wall Street, with Jon Roson, journalist and author of bestselling book The Psychopath Test, writing “I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor [mental hospital] and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.” While Nathan For You plays Nathan’s total lack of basic social competence for laughs, in this context you wonder if there aren’t thousands of more charming Nathan Fielders to whom our economy is beholden, steering the ship straight for an iceberg with a smile on their face.

Fielder himself has noted that his style of wearing down the business owners he speaks to with “But…maybe…yes?” until they concede to whatever madcap idea he’s putting forward is directly related to the sub-prime lending crisis which caused the global recession of the late 2000s. Despite the less than perfect grade transcript shown in the show’s opening its obvious that Fielder is in fact a keen student of modern capitalism. In an interview with the A.V. Club Fielder spoke of how much of these interactions in fact emerged from his obsession with the 2008 recession and how chaos spiralled out from these social conditions where people were pressured into unethical situations by insistent bankers.

As Fielder said: “It all came down to these minor interactions that people would have with each other where someone would know something’s wrong or unethical, but the other person just wouldn’t want to speak up because the social environment wasn’t conducive to that”.

Again, the stilted yet insistent character of Nathan that we chuckle at becomes just a little bit unnerving if we realise that this Canadian caricature is just a blown up version of the very dangerous reality of much of the international financial system. Even the crazy business ideas which provide so much of the show’s humour bear a relation to the ethically questionable financial practices that caused global recession. Nathan is obsessed by loopholes and technicalities, such as when he invents a whole film festival and hastily cobbles together an absurd short film to compete against a 30 second YouTube clip of a man farting on command, all in the name of legitimising a business strategy that could have seen him charged with fraud. This obsession on finding the latest loophole to exploit for profit before it closes is in fact that basis for many of the dodgy lending practices that led to the savage downturn in the world’s economy.

Nathan For You is a show that seems to have come round at the perfect time. It has the dry post-modern wit of an endlessly connected and sceptical age, but also a sharp undercurrent of social commentary that inflates the flaws of modern capitalism until they look cartoonish and ridiculous. But at a time when a firebrand socialist is leading the British Labour Party and an old guy from Brooklyn who rails against the bankers and the billionaire’s is a serious contender for the American presidency, maybe the laugh-out-loud moments in Nathan For You are really the visible bubbles of a seething and boiling invisible rage.