Zarna Garg Interview

One of the more hilarious comics on the touring circuit today, Zarna Garg will make her return to Hilarities Fourth Street Theatre for four shows spanning May 17 & 18.

Garg is a woman. An Indian woman. The number of females in comedy has spiked exponentially over the past decade. The number of Indian women making a splash? To be honest, I couldn’t tell you.

She released her 2023 special, ‘Zarna Garg: One in a Billion,’ on Amazon Prime in 2023. The critically acclaimed hour-long performance culminates years of hard work and crafting material.

While the subject matter may be familiar, the jokes will be new, even to folks who have already caught her special!

“It’s a completely new hour. It’s called ‘Practical People Win.’ It’s a follow-up on the first hour. I mean, it’s similar themes, of course: family, husband, wife, and kids, but my daughter has moved on further along in college. I have a son going to college now. My mother-in-law found it in her heart to be even meaner to me,” Garg said in a recent phone interview with CleveRock. “My comedy should feel to people like they just visited their Indian friend for dinner. It’s home style. It’s a lot of everyday life conversations. It’s husband, wife, job, children, how expensive everything is. It’s extremely relatable because it is everyday life stuff that’s come straight out of my life and I live the same life as everybody else does. A life of being stressed out but also trying to have fun and then wondering why I chose to have three kids. Because many of us grew up, and we were like, ‘Why did we decide to do this?‘”

Of important note, Garg is incredibly familiar with Northeast Ohio! When she immigrated from India to the United States, she settled in Akron, where she attended the University of Akron and obtained her bachelor’s degree in finance before heading north to Case Western Reserve University School of Law, from which she graduated with her Juris Doctor.

Of all places in the vast country that is the United States…Out of all of the exciting places to choose from…It begs the question: Akron? Why Akron?

“Oh, it’s very simple. I did it the most old-fashioned way that people immigrate. I had a relative in Akron, Ohio. My sister lived there. She loved it. She’s been a resident most of her life, and she’s so happy there. So it made sense to go and be with her,” she explained. “I mean, she was the only person willing to take me in at that time in my life when I was going through all kinds of crises, a very complex and difficult set of circumstances brought me to America. But living with her in Akron in Northeast Ohio, which was so warm and loving and accepting of me, revolutionized my life and actually gave me a second shot at having a good life. It’s the rubber capital of the world. I’m sure you are aware of it. Akron has a whole engineering base. Every Indian engineer has been to Akron, is living in Akron, or visits Akron. So it’s all my people.“

Garg was asked if she feels it was difficult swimming aginst the tide to earn the respect that she deserves as a comedian.

“The thing is that because I’m an Indian woman and because I have a big loud mouth, I like to say that I’ve been surviving cancel culture since I was born. This big mouth didn’t just happen in the last five years. This is who I’ve been, and people have been trying to shut me up or slow me down since birth in some way. So I was fully prepared for the industry the way it is,” Garg said. “In fact, I was prepared at pro levels. Brown people can be very, in America, people assume that freedom of speech in this expansive way exists everywhere, and it’s just not the case. The kind of things that I say on stage could get me jailed back home. Forget saying the things. I know women back home and in brown nations that hide from their husbands when they listen to my jokes because they don’t want their spouses to find out that they like my work. I’m used to swimming against the tide. And in that way it’s not been any different. But I will tell you, the industry respects business and I sell tickets. I try not to talk to them about taking me because I’m diverse. Take me because I’m a woman, which would all be good reasons to take a comic on. But the one thing that makes you undeniable is ticket sales. And I lean on that. We have to graduate from the point of view of the male comic and just one-dimensional thinking How many dick jokes do we need?”

HA! She’s not wrong. As a guy who can be amused as an eighth grader listening to dicks jokes and other varieties of bathroom humor, Garg still makes a great point. Comedy clubs can certainly use some fresh topics.

Part of any parent’s responsibility is to help their offspring see their own strengths and talents that they otherwise don’t see in themselves. It is very common for a parent to help guide their children to a suitable passion and, oftentimes, a career path. Garg had already chosen Law as her profession. Her own children turned the tables on her. They saw a talent in her that she didn’t yet see in herself. Garg’s children had visions of her entertaining folks at the top comedy clubs across the country. They saw her as a trailblazer and a star. Her children encouraged her to take a chance, and so she did!

“Nobody knew I was going to be successful at it. That’s the whole beauty of it. The whole thing revealed itself one step at a time. When my kids suggested it, of course, I thought they were crazy,” she recalled. “That’s what every mother thinks when their kid says something, ‘No, that’s Wrong!’ And, I really went to my first-ever open mic, I went to just to shut them up, just to be able to say to them that I tried it, I did it, and I hated it. Yet, when I actually did do it, my life got changed because I had no idea that this was a business, that this was a career, that this was a thing that people did as a matter of entertainment. Until I became a comic, I had never stepped foot in a comedy club. Why would any Indian go? We don’t like fun. We actively seek out stress. It was a big thing, and I’m really glad; I’m thankful to God for giving me the brain to actually listen to my kids. I’ll tell you that because nine times out of 10, when my kids say something, I don’t even listen. I’m like, ‘No, You’re wrong!’ And this one time, thank God my ears were open.”

Garg is quite possibly the most popular India-born comedian currently making waves in the United States. Her Amazon Prime special title, ‘Zarna Garg: One in a Billion,’ isn’t quite accurate. The population of India, as of 2022, was greater than 1.4 billion, thus making Garg LITERALLY 1 out of 1.4 billion. AND, she’s the best. Garg was asked if the accomplishment of coming out on top of such a pool of candidates has fully set into her yet.

“Here’s the thing: Because I am so Indian in my heart until I die, I’m going to be asking myself why I was bad at math,” she joked. “Everything that I do and can’t do, it’s just not something I think about. And I’m completely fixated on how I’m the world’s first Indian, it seems, who cannot do math, who’s bad at science. So I don’t take my career that seriously because I’m still searching for that inner Indian inside me.”

The 1 in 1.4 billion(+) comic, whether she intended to or not, has blazed trails for other female comics, specifically, other female Indian comics. She has broken normalities and made folks laugh at subjects that were otherwise not previously joked about in Indian culture. While her comedy stands on its own merits and is laugh-out-loud material no matter her gender or country of origin, she should be celebrated for tearing down walls and being a leader in what she affectionately calls “Brown Culture.”

“I do think that the time has come for women to laugh, and brown women, in particular, to laugh,” Garg concluded. “We take everything so seriously. We do not give ourselves enough leeway, and the time has come! We’re way past the time, to be honest with you. So I’m proud; I’m honored. I take that responsibility very seriously. I understand that our culture, the Brown Culture, is not fully ready for the extent of jokes that other cultures have enjoyed for many, many decades now. But I believe I’m making a break and doing it elegantly, and hopefully, more people will come behind m,e and then one day, we will be free to laugh at everything. We’ll be free to laugh at our own traumas and the dumb decisions that we make. But I’m definitely putting my first foot into this world, and I’m very proud to be doing it.”