It’s a cold December night three days before
Christmas, and Zarna
Garg is getting ready for her second set at New
York’s West
Side Comedy Club. The place is already packed. There’s a
neurosurgeon on a date night with her husband. A mom and her teenage
daughter who took the train in from Connecticut. And a large group
of 30-somethings nestled at a back table.
Wearing a turquoise kurta set, Garg takes the stage, greeting the audience with her trademark, “Namaste!,” and the crowd goes wild. Whether they discovered her on the stand-up circuit, saw her special, One in a Billion, on Amazon Prime Video, or follow her on TikTok and Instagram, fans can’t get enough of this immigrant mom-turned-comedian and her family-friendly routines, which poke fun at everything from parenting and useless college majors to the crazy differences between love, American vs. Indian-style.
No doubt, Garg has found a captive audience with her edgy, relatable “brown woman” humor. Think: loveable Indian auntie who delivers hilarious social commentary and plugs unorthodox immigrant practices and views. (She says she wears a bindi to avoid being mistaken for a Guatemalan and getting deported and that her oldest son, Brij, is her favorite because he’s “so handsome” and, of course, a boy). Add to the mix, her spot-on timing and unapologetic delivery, and what you get are sold-out shows across the country, performances in Vegas and at the Kennedy Center, and an ongoing opening gig for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s nationwide Restless Leg Tour.
“She’s funny and is a natural entertainer with a distinct voice,” says Felicia Madison, a fellow stand-up comic and booker at the West Side Comedy Club, who knew right away that Garg would rise to celebrity status once she saw her perform. “It was evident to me and everyone else.”
Garg’s ultimate goal is to build the biggest South
Asian comedy business in the world. And by the looks of it, the
49-year-old tiger mom from Mumbai is on her way. One of the biggest
draws is that there’s no one else like her on the comedy circuit.
And among the relatively few Indian women in the field, she’s
probably the only one who shows up in traditional garb ready to take
on her surprisingly deferential husband, a mother-in-law--who
she calls the c-word--and the absurdities of American privilege.
Garg’s not only shaking things up for herself but for women of color
in general.
“Brown women don’t even know they have the right to laugh at certain things,” she says, explaining that the butt of her jokes are typically off-limits in her culture. (In all seriousness, Garg has a lot of love and respect for her mother-in-law, although it’s a “complicated relationship.”)
Before her meteoric rise, the former lawyer spent what she describes as 16 “mind-numbing” years as a stay-at-home-mom who had multiple failed attempts at reentering the workforce. That is, until her then-teenage daughter, Zoya, suggested that she try stand-up. Garg, who had never stepped foot inside a comedy club or even knew that making people laugh could be a job, brought the house down the night of her first open mic in 2018 when she asked, “White people do this?” That was it. She was hooked.
Garg went on to win the best comedy screenplay award at the 2019 Austin Film Festival for her rom-com, Rearranged, and was the winner of Kevin Hart’s Lyft Comics competition in 2021. She was also profiled by the New York Times, Forbes, and Variety, and has appeared on The Today Show and CBS Mornings. Most recently, she made her late night debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and even showed off her acting chops as mama Gavaskar in the newly released film, A Nice Indian Boy on SXSW.
Garg’s approach to her newfound career is simple. “I run it like a successful business,” she says, explaining that she hired editors, coaches, and experts to teach her how to build a compelling social media strategy, infrastructure, and platform. “I like the idea of being a businesswoman, and I want to be accepted and recognized as a player in that world.”
It also doesn’t hurt to have her own in-house team of
advisors and worker bees composed of her financier husband of 25
years, Shalabh, and their three kids, Zoya, 21, Brij, 18, and Veer,
12, all who help write jokes and maintain Garg’s impressive social
media presence. She’s a firm believer in child labor. In fact, when
Garg’s budding comedy career came to a standstill during the
pandemic, it was Brij’s idea to post one of her jokes on TikTok.
“I’ve never said ‘I love you’ to my husband,” Garg quips in the video. ”But if he said it to me, I’d know he’s cheating on me…with a white woman.” The clip went viral within days, garnering close to two million views and turned Garg into an internet sensation.
Madison describes her as a “dynamo,” with a winning combination of drive, likability, confidence, and business savvy. There’s also her killer work ethic, which often leads to 18-hour-long days that include mining for new material on social media and observing the interactions of her kids with their friends; texting herself meticulous notes with joke ideas; and spending hours after each show listening to her own voice recordings to see what worked and what didn’t.
“I seem to have some sort of mental OCD that once I decide I want to do something, I just do it,” says Garg, who has a part-memoir, part-mommy advice book deal, along with a sitcom loosely based on her life in the works. ”This top will not stop spinning until it gets done.”
That kind of steely determination showed up early in life for Garg, when, at the age of 14, her mother died unexpectedly from hepatitis. The next day, her dad delivered a harsh ultimatum: get married or get out. Garg escaped the arranged marriage and spent more than a year couch surfing with friends and relatives until her older sister in the U.S. offered to sponsor her. The 16-year-old hopped on a plane from India to Ohio, where she went on to receive a finance degree from the University of Akron and a law degree from Case Western Reserve’s School of Law.
Years later, Garg ended up meeting her husband online, but on her own terms. She posted a no-nonsense profile on a dating site seeking marriage--not friendship--and urged would-be suitors to bring their tax returns. Shalabh, who was working in Switzerland at the time, responded to the bizarre bio, thinking it was a joke--and the rest is history.
It took courage to run away from home, immigrate to a new country, and to switch things up at the age of 44. But that’s classic Garg, and why she was featured as one of the gutsiest women in comedy on Apple TV’s new docuseries Gutsy, hosted by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
These days, the entire family takes center stage in front of the camera, with “Zarna Garg Show, a bimonthly podcast that tackles everyday topics, like sex, money, and dating.
“We run this together,” says Garg, leaving the door open for her kids to join the entertainment world after college. “I like to say that we are running a family business, and I’m the face of it.”
Life has a funny way of working out in the end, adds Garg, who finally feels settled now that she’s found “her thing.”
“At a time when the
world is literally on fire in every way you can imagine, laughter is
the best medicine,” she says, looking forward to her big tour of
Europe, Australia, and India later this year. “I love the fact that
whenever people see my face, they break out into smiles. I want to
be part of the happy moments movement.”
