Zarna Garg Knows That Sometimes Pretty Hurts

New York Times

29-05-2025

Even with faint splotches of blood blooming across her cheeks, Zarna Garg seemed unfazed. Looks can be deceiving. 'I'm panicking inside,' the comedian confessed as Dr. Sonali Lal drew a laser device with 49 pulsing needles to her skin. 'I wouldn't do this at a place that's not run by a doctor,' Ms. Garg said. 'You have to have some faith in who's shooting this thing right next to your eye.'
She paused, then deadpanned: 'I would send my mother-in-law to the nearby spot. She doesn't need a doctor.'
Coming off the April publication of her New York Times best seller, 'This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir,' Ms. Garg stopped by Dr. Lal's Upper West Side clinic, RejuvaMed, on a drizzly Friday for one of her favorites: a 'vampire facial,' or micro-needling layered with platelet-rich plasma (P.R.P.). (Total cost: $750.)
First, she traded her outfit — a cheery yellow cotton churidar-kurta with delicate flowers custom made in India by the designer Mallika Mathur, paired with orange sandals from Lukurë — for a simple black-and-white kurta, yoga pants, fuzzy pink socks and black Crocs.
Dr. Lal placed a stress ball in Ms. Garg's hand as she drew her blood, filling three vials that would be centrifuged to extract yellow platelets. Last time, Ms. Garg recalled, she went home with a doggy bag of leftover P.R.P. 'Every time I washed my face, I dabbed it,' she said. 'It was like breast milk. You don't waste a drop, right?'
Dr. Lal nodded. 'They call it liquid gold,' she said.
Until five years ago, Ms. Garg's beauty routine consisted of 'Aveeno body lotion on my face and Vaseline.' Now 50, she's upgraded her regimen: 'I use a very expensive La Mer lip balm. I'm not sure it's that different from Vaseline, but it feels good.'
As a stay-at-home mother on the Upper East Side, Ms. Garg was not used to prioritizing herself. 'I have a complicated relationship with self-care — if you're a South Asian woman, you're taught that self-care is bad, it's selfish,' she said. 'If you want to look good, why? You're already married, it's about your kids now.'
When her entertainment career took off, she grew motivated to take better care of her appearance. 'It's not helping anybody for me to stand up onstage and not look put together,' she said. 'It's just distracting.'
After 16 years focusing on her husband, Shalabh, and her three children — Zoya, Brij and Veer — Ms. Garg re-entered the work force in 2019, but not to return to her erstwhile career as a personal injury lawyer. Instead, encouraged by her children, she started working the New York open-mic circuit and performing at Westside Comedy Club before headlining at Caroline's on Broadway by 2020.
In 2023, she talked her way into opening for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on their Restless Leg Tour, and Prime Video aired her special 'One in a Billion.' This spring, she made her film debut in the critically acclaimed rom-com 'A Nice Indian Boy.' Her second special, 'Practical People Win,' will air on Hulu in July, and she is developing a sitcom called 'Zarna' with Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart.
Dr. Lal first met Ms. Garg at a vision board party early in her comedy career. 'I remember being like, 'Wow, this person is really manifesting some serious stuff,'' Dr. Lal said. 'I was like, 'My vision sucks compared to this lady's.'' Ms. Garg's board included Caroline's, her own comedy special and headlining with major artists — all of which she realized in quick succession.
Her trajectory is all the more impressive when you take into account that she had no idea how to set up a joke before she first took the stage. 'I just showed up,' Ms. Garg recounted of her first open mic in the basement of a Mexican restaurant. 'I didn't overthink it. I was like, 'All right, let me tell you about my mother-in-law.''(Mother-in-law jokes have become a staple in her routines, but in reality, their relationship is much more nuanced. 'She's a wonderful human being who says and does things out of love that are extreme, as do I,' Ms. Garg said. 'I already know I'm going to be a horrible mother-in-law.')
The audience lapped up everything this firebrand 5-foot-tall Indian auntie had to say. 'I felt a click in my head. 'Oh, maybe I can do this,'' she said. She went home and Googled 'What is a joke?' and began studying.
'No one had any plan for me, so I just kept making my own plans,' she said. In 1989, after her mother passed away when she was 14 and her father tried to arrange her marriage, Ms. Garg ran away from her pampered life in Mumbai. She spent two years couch-surfing, relying on her wit to generate good will and hospitality from relatives, friends and random acquaintances. 'Wherever I went, I made jokes, I kept things light, I kept things funny,' she said.
She immigrated to America at 17, where she lived with her sister's family in Ohio and put herself through college at the University of Akron and law school at Case Western. At 22, she posted an online personal ad that ended with 'kindly include your most recent tax returns and medical records.' It caught the eye of the man who would become her husband. (According to her book, he slid into her emails with, 'Is this ridiculous ad for real?')
As Mr. Garg's career as a hedge fund manager flourished in New York, she focused on their children. She extricated them from private school and got them into competitive public schools ('You don't have to feel like you have to bankrupt yourself for your kids to learn algebra,' she said.) Zoya, whose college essay about her mother appeared in The New York Times, will graduate from Stanford this June, while Brij is at Cornell and Veer is in middle school.
When her husband was laid off during the Covid-19 pandemic and Ms. Garg had to find work, she did not overthink it. Why not become a famous stand-up comic?
'The big advantage of having failed in life as much as I have is that you stop being scared of it,' she said. 'I've been through so much in life that if a room full of people don't find me funny, it's really not the end of the world.'
After Dr. Lal finished slathering P.R.P. on Ms. Garg's flushed face, she handed her client a mirror and a pink hand-held fan to inspect the results. Ms. Garg was immediately dazzled — but not by her reflection. 'Oh, my God, I need this fan,' she exclaimed. 'Can I take it?'