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- After 16 years as a stay-at-home mom, Zarna Garg crushes comedy, one Indian auntie joke at a time</p>
<p>Kavita Varma-White May 9, 2025 at 11:27 PM</p>
<p>Comedian Zarna Garg poses backstage at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on April 9, 2025. She fled an arranged marriage in India to find a new life, and a career she never expected, in America. (NBC)</p>
<p>With Zarna Garg's comedy career taking off like a minivan peeling out of the carpool line, the joke is on anyone who doubted that a Indian immigrant mom of 3 could pivot in her 40s from being a stay-at-home mom to a wildly successful entertainer.</p>
<p>"An Indian immigrant mom of three walks into the bar of a New York City Mexican restaurant for open mic night …"</p>
<p>What sounds like the start of a joke is the true story of how Garg launched an impressive stand-up comedy career at the age of 44. Within a year, she headlined a comedy club show and started growing a social media audience with TikTok videos. Within a couple of years she was part of a Chris Rock project, which eventually led to opening for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, screenwriting, and starring in TV commercials and a movie.</p>
<p>Her jokes reach a multigenerational audience, thanks to her combined 2.2 million followers on Instagram and TikTok.</p>
<p>In an interview with TODAY.com to discuss her New York Times bestselling book, "This American Woman: A One-In-A-Billion Memoir," Garg shares how being a parent of three kids — Zoya, 22, Brij, 19, and Veer, 13 — was the perfect training for comedy. The one commonality in both, says Garg, is unpredictability.</p>
<p>"You have to be quick on your feet in both jobs," Garg says. "As a parent, something new is happening constantly. Your mind is like, 'What am I going to do? How am I going to deal with it? Do I say something? Do I retract?'"</p>
<p>Meanwhile, as a comic, "you could be workshopping the same material, like all comics do for years. But that night you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know who is going to be in the audience. You don't know what crisis you are going to deal with."</p>
<p>View this post on Instagram</p>
<p>A post shared by Zarna Garg (@zarnagarg)</p>
<p>The parenting moment that changed everything</p>
<p>In her book, Garg shares a relatable parenting moment that was the tipping point to seeking a new vocation. It involved socks.</p>
<p>With three young kids in sports, Garg says she was constantly trying to figure out which kid had which color uniform and socks on any given day. One day she drove her oldest son, then 10, to a town two hours away for a soccer game. The coach didn't let him play because he had the wrong color socks, so mother and son drove back home, both crying.</p>
<p>After that, Garg says she made a point to always carry a bag of different colored socks so her kids would never miss another game. One day she did laundry and there was a lone missing green sock. While she was yelling at her kids, her husband Shalabh Garg pulled her aside.</p>
<p>"Have you lost your mind? Did you come to America to obsess over the kids' socks like Gollum? This is your American dream?" he said.</p>
<p>She writes that his next words truly woke her up: "You freak out everyone in the house … You're destroying your life. You have all this energy and drive and you are wasting it on socks."</p>
<p>View this post on Instagram</p>
<p>A post shared by Zarna Garg (@zarnagarg)</p>
<p>A childhood of trauma and grit</p>
<p>Garg's American dream began under tragic circumstances. Born in Mumbai, India, Garg was the youngest of four children. Her mother passed away when she was 14, and her father immediately wanted to arrange her marriage to get her out of the house. In her book, Garg writes that her father wanted to be "done parenting."</p>
<p>Garg ran away from home. Her father never came for her, so she says she spent a couple of years "couch surfing" between the homes of family and friends. Her father tried one more time to arrange her marriage but in the nick of time, Garg was granted a student visa from the U.S. Embassy, a plan she had put in place with her older sister, who was living in Akron, Ohio. She writes about boarding the plane: "My life as I knew it was wiped away. This was a one-way flight. I was an American now."</p>
<p>Garg's book reveals a story of pain, resilience and triumph. And it's funny. She tells the story of how as a 22-year-old law student, she put a personal ad on an Indian singles website, and filtered through "Indian American doctors, engineers and lawyers who flew in from all over America to Cleveland for a thirty-minute 'date' with me at McDonalds."</p>
<p>Arranged marriages, tricky mother-in-laws, overbearing parents who want their kids to ace the SAT and become doctors … these are all topics Garg finds humor in when she's onstage. While it's standard fare for anyone who comes from an immigrant (especially Indian) family, she explains why it's relatable for a larger audience.</p>
<p>"At its core, we're all the same. I mean, every mother is kind of worried about the same thing. The immigrants come at it from a slightly different angle. But if you talk to any mother for five minutes, it's like the same stuff we worry about," she tells TODAY.com.</p>
<p>"The mother-in-law thing is a great unifier. Everybody in every culture understands the complications with that relationship," she says. "And feeling like an insider or outsider is a very common thing ... There will be small town people who move to LA who totally feel like they don't belong. In fact, I'll argue that somebody from Mumbai, India, feels more like they belong in LA than someone from Arkansas."</p>
<p>Though she embraces the identity of being everyone's nosy Indian auntie, Garg says she doesn't consider herself solely an "Indian comic" since she has worked at so many mainstream comedy clubs around America. "I've never positioned my comedy in that way. Of course, the Indians get an extra kick out of it because literally they are seeing their mothers in me."</p>
<p>Having mom guilt for being a working mom</p>
<p>Garg says that once she became a full-time working mom doing comedy shows at night and on weekends, she had plenty of mom guilt. After years of being the stay-at-home mom who picked up the slack for her working mom friends, the tables had turned.</p>
<p>"I mean, mom guilt … I don't know that it ever leaves you. I have friends whose moms are 90-something and those moms are still feeling guilt," Garg says.</p>
<p>When she would go to work at night, Garg says she focused on feeling good about at least being home when her kids went off to school.</p>
<p>"But it is hard, because your heart drops every weekend because other moms at my kids' sports will send me videos. 'Oh, he scored a goal, or … whatever big thing happened in basketball.' And in those moments, I feel like I've missed something," she says.</p>
<p>In addition to doing the "Zarna Garg Family Podcast" together, all of Garg's kids are involved in her career, Zarg says. Daughter Zoya, who is graduating from Stanford soon, was the first to encourage Garg to do comedy. Son Brij, who just finished his first year at Cornell, made the first viral TikTok video for his mom. And Garg says son Veer, a middle school student, is her "most honest and vocal critic."</p>
<p>On their podcast, Garg is known for engaging her kids in all kinds of debates, from sibling rivalry to interracial romance to sex.</p>
<p>When asked if she'd want to arrange a marriage for her American-born kids, despite the fact that she boldly avoided that fate for herself, Garg is frank: "Yes, very much."</p>
<p>But what if her kids are in love with someone of their choice?</p>
<p>Garg admits that first she'd try to dissuade them. But ultimately, she says: "I'm not against them finding their own thing. But I would definitely be that meddlesome mother." She puts her hands on her head in disdain and adds, "I could just see it right now. I'm not going to be able to give it up so easily."</p>
<p>There's no doubt, though, that it would be fodder for good comedy in a future show.</p>
<p>This article was originally published on TODAY.com</p>
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