Nate Bargatze Reveals His Wife’s Reaction to Being Mocked in His Stand Up (Exclusive)

Stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze often talks about his wife Laura Bargatze during his sets — especially when he’s talking about how she manages their household and finances.

The good news? She’s fully in on the joke.

“She’s been fine with it,” Nate tells PEOPLE with a laugh. “She’s got a great sense of humor, and she likes it when we’re making fun of each other. But you have to show love.”

He admits that when he was first starting, he was less adept at the gentle mocking, and it didn’t come off very well.

“At the beginning, when I first started, this was something I didn’t know how to do very well,” he says. “You have to show that it’s coming from a place of love for the audience to go along with you. And at the beginning, I was not showing that very well, and you could feel the crowd be like, ‘Man, just be divorced,’ Which was not the point. So yeah, you have to learn how to do it.”

He adds that if he’s teasing his wife onstage — whom he met while they were both waiting tables at Applebee’s in Nashville when they were in their early 20s — he needs to make sure he’s making fun of himself twice as hard.

“The jokes are mostly on me,” he says. “I want to make fun of her, I have to make fun of me times two. But I’m very fortunate in that she’s been very good about it. And she still keeps providing me with material.”

Bargateze, who just released his first book, Big Dumb Eyes: Stories From a Simpler Mind, just two weeks after being tapped to host this year’s Emmy Awards, says his recent rise to global fame has been a wild ride. (He shot to a new level of stardom when he hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time in 2023.)

“I’ve been doing comedy for 20 years, but it does feel like it happened overnight,” he say of fame after hosting. “To reach the mainstream has just been a whole other level.”

Now, he’s about to film his first movie (The Breadwinner, costarring Mandy Moore) and through his Nateland Entertainment company, he hopes to keep churning out the kind of fare the whole family can watch together.

“Life is still pretty normal,” he says, noting that he and Laura and their daughter Harper still live in the same house and neighborhood in Nashville, and mostly hang out with their neighbors and old friends.

“We live in a very normal neighborhood and not really around show business, so it’s as normal as it can be,” he says. “But yeah, I mean it’s changing‚ if anyone sees my brother or sister’s last name, now they’re like “Are you [related] to…?’ But everybody’s taking it in stride and is super supportive.”

He does admit his contact list is loaded with fellow famous comedian pals these days.

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“Sometimes I’ll show my buddy my text threads, and it will be like him and then it’s Jerry Seinfeld and Jimmy Fallon and Chris Rock, and then him again, and I’ll just show him like, ‘Look at where you’re at! Good company.”

Big Dumb Eyes: Stories From a Simpler Mind is available now wherever books are sold.