The comedian is part of a starry roster Saturday at the annual comedy cornucopia at TD Garden.
By Nick A. Zaino III Updated October 30, 2024
Zarna Garg did not expect her fame. There is probably no way a 14-year-old kid living in India could predict she would someday become a popular stand-up comedian in the United States, entertaining millions on social media and joining the bill for the 2024 edition of Comics Come Home at TD Garden this weekend. She certainly could not have foreseen she would be signing pineapples for loyal fans after gigs. But that’s where she is now, just six years removed from her first open mic in New York City.
“Oh, no no no no no,” she said, speaking by phone in advance of her Boston gig, when asked what that 14-year-old would think of her future self. “I sometimes think about it. I’m like, if my parents were alive, they would be crying right now. They would be like, we didn’t get the engineer, we didn’t get the accountant, we didn’t even get the scientist. What got we got was the comic. What happened to our lives?”
In December, Garg will mark 26 years since she left India to avoid an arranged marriage after her mother died. In that time, she has gotten a law degree, married, and raised three children. All before she told her first joke at that open mic in her 40s. She had always been funny, but never had a concept of how to make a living from that. Until her then-teenage daughter convinced her to go to an open mic.
Garg had no idea what she should say in front of that first crowd, so she started talking about her mother-in-law. They laughed, so she kept doing it. The more she performed, the more people wanted to see her. “I couldn’t understand what was happening, because I was talking about things that were so specific to me,” she said. “I didn’t think anybody would care about my life and my idiosyncrasies and the craziness of what my mother-in-law says, or the observations that I’ve made, but people were having so much fun that I remember getting off and thinking, ‘There’s something here.’”