Record Bey-ker.
A “clean” comedian who has sold more tickets for his latest tour than Beyoncé has announced that he wants to build his own Disney World-style theme park in Nashville with himself as the mascot.
Tennessee comic Nate Bargatze, 47, who has made a living from his no-swears, no-politics everyman act, plans to create the park — Nateland — in his hometown Nashville, covering more than 100 acres at a cost of about $350 million.
Bargatze has said he isn’t interested in the culture war politics that have dogged comedy in the last decade or so, and would rather focus on entertaining people.
“I’m in the ticket-selling business. That’s all I’ve ever been in,” he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Friday.
If raw sales are anything to go by, the openly-Christian comic‘s plan is working.
In 2025, Bargatze’s shows grossed $77.5 million, almost 50% more than the second-highest-selling comedian in America, Sebastian Maniscalco ($34 million), according to Pollstar.
His ongoing “Big Dumb Eyes” tour is on track to sell more than 2 million tickets, selling out sports arenas and stadiums.
In comparison, superstar Beyoncé sold 1.6 million tickets in her top-grossing music tour of 2025.
His company, Nateland Entertainment, has the tagline “Good clean funny,” and has grown to include a podcast network, a four-night comedy cruise, and content from a roster of other clean comics.
Nargatze, who grew up in the Nashville suburb of Old Hickory, also hosts the ABC game show “The Greatest Average American,” and his first theatrical movie, “The Breadwinner,” starring SNL’s Colin Jost, is out this month.
With Nateland, he plans to go even further — aiming to become the Walt Disney of Tennessee. If all goes to plan, he’ll be the mascot, too.
“I’m the Mickey Mouse,” he joked to the WSJ.
To make his ambitious plans happen, he convinced his neighbor, former KPMG partner Felix Verdigets, to be his chief executive.
The pair hired a lobbyist and worked on wooing the rich and powerful of Nashville for support, contracting with California firm Storyland Studios, founded by an alum from Disney, Legoland, and Universal Studios to design the park.
The exact location of the park has not been made public as negotiations continue, Verdigets said.
However, with Nargatze’s clean act and proven ability to sell tickets, finding backing at a state level isn’t proving difficult.
“The projects we incentivize have to fit this heartland, middle America approach to things. What Nate represents aligns with our state,” Tennessee deputy governor Stuart McWhorter told the Wall Street Journal.
Nargatze hopes to tap into the same southern nostalgia evoked by the country music theme park Opryland USA, which shuttered in 1997 and where his first job was at 15 sweeping up the park.
After a year of community college, he worked as a water-meter reader and met his wife working at Applebee’s, before moving to Chicago to do standup, and then New York in 2004.
In 2017, he had his big break thanks to his set in the premiere of the Netflix series “The Standups.”
He first hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2023 and hosted the Emmys in 2025.
With many comedians going increasingly down the route of progressive politics in the wake of President Trump’s election and the Covid pandemic, being family-friendly provided Nargatze with a niche.
“I could just see the way it was going, but I had to build that trust,” he said.
