How Zarna Garg found success as a comedian after leaving India to avoid an arranged marriage
The lawyer and homemaker turned comedian shares her surprising path to comedy
Zarna Garg knows what it's like to blow up your life and start over.
Today she's a professional comedian with a successful tour, her own Amazon Prime special (One in a Billion) and a new podcast (The Zarna Garg Show), but she had to reinvent herself several times before finding her calling.
Her first transformation happened while she was still a teenager living in India. When she was just shy of 15, Garg's mother suddenly passed away and, as the last of her siblings to leave home, her father demanded she immediately get married.
"Our world just got shattered in a way that no one had imagined and I think that he, in his wisdom, decided, 'I'm done parenting,'" she says in an interview with Q guest host Talia Schlanger.
"It was, in hindsight, probably a knee jerk reaction. But I was always the person who wanted to go to school and study, and had all these idealistic notions of the world…. So I was like, 'I don't want to.' And my dad was very much like, 'You don't actually have that choice if you want to live at home.'"
Rather than have an arranged marriage, Garg spent about two years staying with friends and family in Mumbai before relocating to Akron, Ohio to live with her married sister.
It was during this new chapter of her life in the United States that Garg graduated from high school, received a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Akron and a law degree from Case Western Reserve University.
From there, Garg landed a high-profile job as a lawyer, but in her stand-up special One in a Billion she jokes that she was the "worst defense attorney ever."
WATCH | Official trailer for One in a Billion:
"Every time I sent a legal notice, opposing counsel would be like, 'This is the funniest notice we've ever read.' And I was like, 'Did you read that I said I'm going to sue you? This is not supposed to be funny. Why are you laughing?'" she tells Schlanger.
"I would write things like, 'You know, none of this would have happened if your client would have just listened to his mother. Here we are in this multimillion dollar lawsuit and what is wrong with you people?"
When Garg met her husband and became a stay-at-home mom of three children, she says she felt invisible. She found an outlet in humour that her children took notice of and eventually ended up convincing her to pursue professionally.
If you find your calling two days before you die, it's still a victory — you still found it.- Zarna Garg
"On a whim, my daughter's like, 'Mom, just do your stand-up comedy.' And I was like, 'That's not a job.' And she's like, 'No, people get paid to tell jokes!' I'm like, 'What do you know?' Garg recalls. "That's a mother's predisposition. Any time a kid says something, you're like, 'You don't know anything! Please go back to your Kumon workbooks.'"
The gentle prod from her children worked. Garg went to an open mic at a comedy club and in her five minutes on stage she knew that comedy was what she was meant to do.
"It doesn't matter when you find your calling," she says. "If you find your calling two days before you die, it's still a victory — you still found it. Like when you see a rose, a beautiful rose, you don't look at it and think, 'Oh, it's so beautiful, but it bloomed late in life.' No one cares. You found it. And that's what matters."
The full interview with Zarna Garg is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Written by Mofe Adeniran. Interview with Zarna Garg produced by Vanessa Greco.