Nate Bargatze has officially sold more tickets for a stand-up tour than any other comedian in history.

The 47-year-old Nashville-born comic has sold 2,016,254 tickets for his ongoing “Big Dumb Eyes” arena tour.

That puts him well ahead of the previous record of 1,981,720 tickets sold, which was held by Jeff Dunham’s “Spark of Insanity” tour for almost two decades. Dunham’s recording of that tour was released in 2007.

Variety reports that Bargatze will be presented with the Guinness World Record certificate onstage at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto later today, August 15.

The Independent has approached Bargatze for comment.

Bargatze has arrived at the new milestone much faster than the previous record-holder. While Dunham’s total sales came after a little over 35 months on tour, Bargatze began his tour in April 2025 and sold 2 million tickets in just over 16 months.

Along the way he became the first and only comedian to sell out three consecutive shows at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena in a single year, a feat that places him alongside musicians Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks.

Online, Bargatze is best known for hosting the Emmys in 2025 and for a Saturday Night Live skit he performed while hosting the show in October 2023. In the sketch, the comedian donned a powdered wig to play George Washington rallying his troops in the Revolutionary War with inspiring words about choosing “our own systems of weights and measures” and ditching British spellings.

“One day, if we are brave, we will get rid of the ‘u’ in a lot of British words like color and armor,” he tells his men. “But by God, we will keep the British ‘u’ in the word glamour!” The clip has been viewed over 32 million times on YouTube, and was called “the best SNL sketch in years” before spawning a sequel.

As a stand-up, Bargatze has built his brand on being folksy and inoffensive. He grew up in a devoutly Christian family as the son of a professional clown, an experience that inspired the name of his 2012 debut comedy album Yelled At By a Clown.

“I grew up watching clean comedy. Starting out, I wanted my parents to come watch me,” he told Vulture in 2015. “I still think that way, even though I’m a parent now. I’m a clean comic, but I don’t really want people to notice it.”