An American Indian comedian who is also a TikTok phenomenon will perform in northern Illinois this week during her One in a Billion Show.
Zarna Garg is a comedian, producer, and screenwriter but she didn’t start off that way. She left her career as a lawyer to be a comedian about a year before the pandemic hit. She said when that happened, she was sure her newfound profession was doomed. Then her son suggested she use TikTok.
“If my kids say anything, I’m not listening. You know, they don’t listen to me. I don’t listen to them,” she added. “We are the perfect dysfunctional family. So, he took some of my jokes, and he cut them up and he put them on TikTok. And the jokes just went viral, like, overnight.”
Garg said from there she started showing the world a peek into her personal life and those views received more traction.
“And it kind of made me realize that those bits were actually bringing in a whole new audience and uniting a whole new group of people who weren’t necessarily looking for stand-up comedy,” she said.
She explained that this content shows that she goes through the same things her viewers go through.
“I realized that the kind of things I discussed with my kids are very similar to the things that every mom is saying to their kids in some way,” she said, “’Eat your dinner, eat your dinner.’ I mean, every mother is fighting this battle.”
Garg said her comedy brings America a taste of mainstream India.
She has over 605 thousand followers on TikTok with over one million views. Zarna Garg is set to hit the stage at Batavia’s Comedy Vault Oct. 27 through the 29.
- Yvonne Boose is a current corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It’s a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.
