Comedian Zarna Garg Pokes Fun At Fellow Indian Americans

February 24, 2024

Recently Zarna Garg’s 11-year-old son asked her what gender pronoun should he use at his school in New York City. “I told him, you tell them you are Indian. Your pronoun is doctor,” Garg said, during her stand-up comedy act last month on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

“Let me tell you about my 17-year- old son,” Garg, 49-years-old, continued. “So handsome…I just got the best piece of news about him…(he) is now 5’ 8 and ¼ inches tall. This is amazing because the average Indian man in 5’5”. America made my son taller. Usually it makes people fatter.”

Garg’s appearance on the Jimmy Fallon show marks the first time an Indian American woman comedian was featured on a major TV show in America.

Her three shows this weekend, at the 100-seat West Side Comedy Club in New York and with tickets priced at $50, are sold out. Next month, in addition to the New York club, she will be performing at venues in Dallas Fort Worth and Chicago.

The Zarna Garg Family Podcast on YouTube has more than 310,000 subscribers. So far, she has posted 809 videos on YouTube. In One in a Billion, a video series produced by Amazon, she makes fun of the lives of Indians in America, from marriage matchmakers to aunties and mother-in-law’s.

Garg was one of the comics in a BBC Show COMEDIANS VS THE NEWS held in New York in March 2022. She has more than 933,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 200,000 on Facebook

Garg describes herself in a blog post as an “all around nosey, overbearing Indian auntie.” Her life journey taught her “what all Indian aunties do best – how to become a storyteller…determined to put a happy, brown, immigration voice out in the universe.”

In 2019, Garg’s first screenplay, ‘Rearranged’, won the Top Comedy Feature award at the Austin Film Festival, from among 11,000 entries. It is, Garg says in a blog post, the “true story of a tenacious teen girl, raised in the patriarchy of wealthy India in the 90’s, who flees an arranged marriage in pursuit of a life and love of her own in America.”

In fact, the story is Garg’s story. She is from a Gujarati family from Mumbai. At age 15, a year after her mother’s sudden passing, her dad tried to arrange her marriage. While she wanted to continue in school, filled with idealistic notions about the world, her dad gave her a choice: “It was get married or leave this home,” Garg writes in a blog post.

“Feeling like the walls were caving on me, I decided to leave home and find my own way. As a young teen, I quickly learned the value of ‘being the fun one’…Friends, relatives and strangers opened up their homes to me because I made them laugh and kept it light. I got invited to Diwali and Holi dinners because they knew I’ll make it fun.”

Garg stayed with relatives and friends in Mumbai for about two years. Then, at age 16, she figured out a way to emigrate to the United Statres and stay with her married sister in Akron, Ohio. Her sister and “her family graciously agreed to have me move in (for years!) with them, while I figured out my life,” Garg notes in a blog post.  

Zarna Garg, right, with her mother-in-law Rekha Garg

Referring to the 1988 Eddie Murphy film, Garg said, "I dreamt of coming to America, just like Eddie Murphy.” She was performing a stand-up comedy act at the Meredith Corporation's Asian American Association's Diwali event in 2021, according to People.

"When you're outside America looking in, everything looks so much more fun here — really. Like people frolicking in hot tubs, jacuzzis, bubble baths,” she added. “In India, you get water in a bucket…There's buckets in America too, but they're filled with fried chicken."

While in Akron, Garg graduated from high school, earned a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Akron and a law degree from Case Western Reserve University.

She then worked at a law firm. In 1998, she married Shalabh Garg, after they met via an online platform. Shalabh, who in 2022 co-founded New York based investment firm Tesseract Macro, has had a long career on Wall Street including as Chief Investment Officer at Nomura Asset Management, 2004-2019. He earned an MBA from Columbia University, 2001, and a degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, 1996.

Zarna Garg told the Meredith gathering that her husband “went to a great college, has an amazing job, he's what you in America would call a catch…I know this because his mother reminds me…Every day."

In November 2023, in a post on X, Garg says that “in deep poverty in rural India, my mother in law Rekha raised not one, but two brilliant, hardworking decent sons…Happy bday mom, you took in an orphan daughter in law, gave her wings and because no good deed goes unpunished, now she will make fun.”

Garg gave up her legal career, staying home to take care of her daughter and two sons. As a stay-at-home mummy, she felt invisible.  

Zarna Garg, second from left, with her husband, right, and children

Garg read comedian Kevin Hart’s book, I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons. She realized that, like Hart, she “too had spent years of my life ‘being funny’ so that I would be liked, be invited for a warm meal and have a place to visit…Though, unlike him, I didn’t have a smart mother to guide me. I bumbled along my own path for decades (this may explain the late start?). As I read the words, things started falling in place in my head and heart and I decided that I would try my luck somewhere…I couldn’t recall any female Indian comedians who had jokes that reflected everyday Indian and American life.”

Her children, who enjoyed and encouraged her humor, gently nudged her. In an essay, Garg’s daughter Zoya wrote that her mother “could make anyone laugh, and I wanted her to be paid for it” since she envied the financial freedom and self-esteem of working women. When Zoya asked her mother if she thought of becoming a stand-up comedian, her mother “began to cry and told me it was too late for her.”

Zoya’s 2021 essay, written while she was a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, New York, was included in her college applications. That year, she was one of the high school seniors who submitted their college admission essays, on money, work or social class, to be considered for publilcation by The New York Times. Zoya, whose essay was among the five published by the Times, is studying computer science and classics at Stanford University.

Step by step, Garg started performing as a stand-up comedian. First among friends and family, then their friends and family and then for anyone who “show up and watch me try.”

At age 45, spending five minutes at an open mic at a comedy club convinced Zarna Garg to pursue a career in comedy. “I felt at home on the mic. I could comfortably look around and say funny things,” she writes in a blog post.

“Comedy is rooted in discomfort, but teaches you to keep perspective and turn the pain into therapy,” Garg writes. “Everyday problems become everyday observations and end up as everyday musings.”

Speaking of returning to work in her mid-40’s and that too in an entirely different career, Garg told an interviewer for Tom Power’s podcast, "It doesn't matter when you find your calling. If you find your calling two days before you die, it's still a victory…You found it. And that's what matters."

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