When your angelic goddaughter, who’s ever-so-slightly sceptical about your style of parenting, insists you watch every single clip of Zarna Garg, the Indian-American comedian “so much like you”, you can get a little prickly. What fresh meanness will this be? Garg is intense, real. Spills it all, relationships, kids. Makes you laugh through it all. Within two minutes of watching Garg’s skit as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai’s almost-therapist, you get the picture.
Garg only began her career as a comedian at 43, after 16 years as a stay-at-home mother of three kids. Eight years later she’s had huge stand-up comedy success, opened for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler during their Restless Leg tour, created The Zarna Garg Family Podcast and written a New York Times bestseller (This American Woman); not to mention she has an enviable knack of getting us to laugh at ourselves. Angry about stereotypes? Garg embraces those stereotypes in the funniest way possible. If you ask me, inside every chill parent is an inner Garg wanting to get out.
Sure, there is a bit of bothsidesism: she praised both Kamala Harris and Usha Vance before 2024’s US presidential election, and last year she took part in Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival, an event we hardly needed Human Rights Watch to tell us: “This whitewashing comes amid significant increase in repression, including a crackdown on free speech, which many of these comedians defend but people in Saudi Arabia are completely denied.” Garg stood by her decision.
Now, she is coming to Australia with her Million Dollar Excuses tour in November and December. By early September she’d already sold out four Sydney shows without a whisper of publicity. Then the Opera House added a Studio date, and Melbourne went bonkers for her, adding a show at the Palais to the two at the National.
Worst habit?
Worrying. It’s my default setting. My kids tell me, “There’s nothing to worry about, Mom.” And I say, “OK, you don’t know what I’ve got to worry about. I’m just going to keep worrying.”
Greatest fear?
We live a very public life because of what I do. My greatest fear is that my husband and my kids are negatively affected by that. It worries me that we have become an easy target because as I succeed I have more and more haters out there who find something that I say offensive.
The line that stayed with you?
We were having dinner with friends and they were making fun of me. My husband looked up and he said, “You know why they’re all making fun of you? Because one day you’re going to find your thing and then you’ll be simply unstoppable.” He just kept eating and everybody got quiet, including me, because at that point even I had given up on myself.
Biggest regret?
None, really. I’m shocked by my life more than anyone else will be. I didn’t go out looking to be an actor or a comic. I thought I would be, like, a dental hygienist. I was thinking maybe an Uber driver – anything that could make me money and not make me feel worthless. This is what the universe wants me to do and if that is what the universe has decided, that I’m going to put my faith into it and just do it and not worry about that.
Tell us about your turning point...
There have been a few. My mom died unexpectedly when I was 14. I had a very happy, affluent childhood in Mumbai until that point. But the day after her death my dad was like, ‘You need to get married’. He had just lost his wife. He was sick of everything and everybody, and I was the easiest target. I ended up leaving home because I had to, trying to figure out where to go and what to do. I ultimately made my way to America, where my sister lives.
In more recent times, six, seven years ago, there was so much internal tension in my life, I kept lashing out at everybody and everything around me over trivial things. I remember my husband pulling me aside. He said, “You know, you’ve become unbearable. If you don’t figure out what the next move of your life is, I’m not sure I can live with you any more, because you’re yelling at everybody, you’re just unhappy all the time.” That became a moment of reckoning, like, I have to take control of my life or it’s just going to slip me by entirely.
The artwork or song you wish was yours?
I wish I was a rapper. I want to write rap songs about mom life, like my dishes and my laundry and my kids. [None] of the rap songs reflect my life, like, I’m not wearing diamonds or chains. I want to rap about something like my dishwasher liquid running out.
If you could time-travel, where would you go?
Absolutely nowhere else. My career would not have been possible even 10 years ago; yeah, no way without social media would I have this career.
Zarna Garg performs in Sydney at the Opera House Studio on November 21 and York Theatre, Seymour Centre, on November 24-25 and 27-28; at Fortitude Valley Music Hall, Qld, on November 29; and in Melbourne at the National Theatre on December 1 and 3, and the Palais Theatre on December 6.
Take 7 appears in Spectrum every Saturday
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