Zarna Garg

Zarna Garg, born February 15 1975 in Mumbai, is an Indian-American stand-up comic, screenwriter and former lawyer whose act mines the everyday drama of immigrant motherhood.

At fourteen she fled India to escape an arranged marriage, joined a sister in Akron, Ohio, earned a finance degree at the University of Akron and a J.D. at Case Western Reserve, then spent sixteen years as a stay-at-home mother in New York City before her children dared her to try an open-mic in 2018 — a pivot that launched her comedy career overnight.

Within a year she had written the romantic-comedy screenplay “Rearranged,” which won Best Comedy Screenplay at the 2019 Austin Film Festival and reached the Nicholl Fellowship semifinals, and by 2021 she had taken first place on Kevin Hart’s Peacock series “Lyft Comics” and the Ladies of Laughter newcomer title; Apple TV+ featured her in “Gutsy” as “one of the gutsiest women comedians in America” the following year.

Her breakout streaming hour, “Zarna Garg: One in a Billion,” premiered on Prime Video on May 16 2023, delivering rapid-fire riffs on matchmakers, entitled kids and clueless husbands from the Gramercy Theatre stage; The New York Times praised her sitcom-ready presence. Variety named her one of its “10 Comics to Watch” for 2023, and she has since popped up on “The Tonight Show,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and other U.S. talkers while opening arena shows for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler; her second special, “Practical People Win,” landed on Hulu in 2025.

Garg’s creative orbit keeps expanding: she voices her home life on “The Zarna Garg Family Podcast,” released her memoir “This American Woman” on April 29 2025 (quickly a New York Times bestseller), and made her screen-acting debut as Megha Gavaskar in the queer rom-com “A Nice Indian Boy,” which premiered at SXSW and earned a New York Times Critic’s Pick this spring.