Review: “Big Dumb Eyes” by Nate Bargatze

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I’m going to do this one differently. Just a few observations below.

I’m not wasting too much space on this guy because at the time of this writing and after years of being studiously apolitical (i.e. silent any time it mattered) [eye roll], he’s been  caught out cavorting with the magats lately. Personally, I always assumed he was a magat (literally everything about him tracks). I’m curious why he’s suddenly out and proud?

I highly recommend Josh Johnson, Tom Papa, and Jim Gaffigan if you’re in the market for standups with a moral compass + intelligent comedy + comedy that parents can listen to with kids in the vicinity.

I listened to this on a road trip with the kids in 2025. Objectively it was a mostly funny, never crass, family friendly road trip listen. As a woman and a mother, the weaponized incompetence bit got a little annoying, but that wasn’t my biggest concern.

His narrow-minded worldview was off-putting at times.

His comedy specials tend to present him as a dim, bewildered everyman. In the book, readers get more of the real Nate: Southern, family-oriented, and shaped by an evangelical Christian upbringing. BDE contains more discussion of faith than his public comedy persona. For a man who claims his faith is an important part of his life, as indeed he does repeatedly in BDE, I can’t understand how hasn’t been driven to speak at least over the course of the last year (at a minimum) if not much earlier. It told me enough about his so-called “apolitical” stance long before Cheryl’s photos even emerged. 

I’ll get personal for a moment. I’m Hindu (Sanatan Dharma). My faith teaches me that all faiths lead to the same truth along different paths. I’ve been raised to be tolerant of people of all faiths (and none). In college I did a minor in Religion. I enjoy studying it and learning about different faith traditions. So I don’t object to the inclusion of his faith - it is who he is after all, and this is a memoir. But I felt that certain stories he shared carried implicit moral judgments. I felt some underlying assumptions were presented as self-evidently correct. As a non-Christian reader I am perfectly comfortable reading memoirs from religious authors of other faiths, but become very uncomfortable when a story shifts from “this is my experience” to “this is how people ought to think about life, family, or morality.” I didn’t feel the anecdotes in question were aggressively evangelizing, but they did reveal a worldview that felt narrow-minded and for me, this interrupted the comedic flow of his typical observational comedy. 

He makes no references to politics at all in BDE and has claimed to be “apolitical” IRL.