Feb 25, 2025
In Part 2, we pick up where we
left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his
hometown of San Francisco.
The first was when he went to
college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the
mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways
that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed,
he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in
Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the
Comedy Underground, in fact.
As he describes it, to say
that he bombed that first time would be an understatement. "It's
the closest I've ever come to literally shitting my pants." Nato
then does a rendition of his first joke that night. Audible growls
are heard in our recording.
Nevertheless, he did a few more
open-mics at that spot in Seattle. He liked it enough. But after
graduating from college and moving back to The City, he dedicated
his life to being a union organizer.
As a history student at Reed,
he'd written a thesis about the anti-Chinese movement in San
Francisco in the 1870s. Nato then explains how the series
Warrior is based on this time in SF. There's bits in the
story about the incredibly racist and anti-union human for which
Kearny Street is sometimes attributed to. That thesis is what got
Nato interested in doing labor work.
He resumed going to comedy
shows, but not getting up on stage. Around the time he turned 30,
he found himself laboring over the jokes he'd tell at all the
weddings he'd go to. He was also asked to give talks at labor
conferences, which doubled as canvasses for Nato to deliver more of
his own comedy material.
All of these comedic
sprinklings led him back to the stage. His first regular spot back
in SF was the BrainWash (RIP) on Folsom Street. Once again, the
jokes bombed, though his pants fared better this go-round. He
offers up another telling of a joke from that era of his. You've
been warned. As he left the BrainWash one of those nights, local
comedy legend Tony Sparks asked him to come back the next week, and
he did. Eventually, Nato invited his friends to come see him
perform.
He'd moved back to San
Francisco in 1997 to do union organizing, as we've mentioned. Two
years before that, John Sweeney had been elected president of the
AFL-CIO. Sweeney pushed to "organize the unorganized" and bring
young people into the labor movement. Nato was part of this wave.
He got a job at Noah's Bagels and organized a union
there.
He went to anything he heard
about that interested him. He and his then-girlfriend/now wife
would attend talks and rallies together. Nato would sometimes find
himself that only ally at, say, LGBTQIA union meetings. This was
well before we even used words like "ally."
Nato was approached to organize
workers at the Real Foods on 24th Street. Then the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union was beginning to organize bike and
car messengers in San Francisco. Nato worked as a car messenger,
which he did for three years, and helped organize his coworkers. We
go on a short sidebar about bike messenger culture in The City in
the late-Nineties. It was huge.
A few moves from union to union
here and there, and Nato found himself raising money and helping to
open a low-wage workers' center for young and immigrant folks in
the service industry. That center is still around
today.
The second time Nato left San
Francisco was in 2012. This flight took him to New York City, where
he relocated to write for his friend W. Kamau Bell's first TV
show, Totally Biased. As Nato puts it, he "got the chance
to be a Jewish comedy writer living in Brooklyn for six months."
Then, in 2018, he and his family moved to Havana, Cuba, for six
months while his wife worked on her PhD research.
Nato says that the only time he
was tempted to relocate permanently was during his time in NYC. His
kids liked it there. They looked at different neighborhoods and
even schools. But Nato wasn't all that happy in New York. The
experience took a toll on his friendship with Kamau (they've since
moved on and are tight once again). And then the show got canceled.
The universe had spoken.
That center he'd helped to
found back in San Francisco had passed the nation's first
minimum-wage municipal law. In 2006, they helped pass paid sick
days here in The City. Nato had left the organization just before
that to join the California Nurses' Association (CNA). Through that
org, he was part of the ultimately successful effort to keep St.
Luke's hospital open.
It was after his time with the
CNA, 2011 or so, that Nato returned to doing stand-up.
He recorded his first comedy
album and went on his first comedy tour (with Kamau). In 2014, he
returned to organized labor, joining Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) 1021. He works there today, as head of
collective bargaining.
We return to comedy and Nato
lists off some more folks doing open-mics with him a decade or so
ago who've moved on to various levels of fame and recognition—Ali
Wong, Chris Garcia, Shang Wang, Kevin Camia, Moshe Kasher, and
Brent Weinbach, to name a few.
Nato takes us on yet another
sidebar, but it's a good one. It's all about the "Punchline
Pipeline," the system by which local comics can test their chops
for a while until they're ready (or not) to move on to bigger and
better things.
It took Nato three years to
work up to the level of paid host at The Punchline. Around 2006, to
go back, he and Kamau started doing political comedy shows
together. This was during the George W. Bush years, when "leftist,"
"liberal" comedy was big. Then Obama got elected and that type of
comedy cooled off considerably. Nato started to host shows at The
Make-Out Room monthly. He credits that stint as the time that he
"figured it out."
Nato still does stand-up,
though not with the intensity with which he performed in his
Thirties. Today, he contributes regularly to
The Bugle Podcast. He works with Francesca Fiorintini and her
Bitchuation Room show. He's also trying to find time to write a
book—a funny take on union organizing. And he's kicking around the
idea of another comedy album, which would be his
third.
We end the podcast with Nato's
thoughts on our theme this season: Keep It Local.
We recorded this episode at
Nato's home on Bernal Hill in January 2025.
Photography by Nate
Oliveira