How Zarna Garg became an unlikely TikTok star
The Indian American comedian was able to capture the immigrant experience in her standup and then adapt it for a social media audience.
In just about every article about TikTok, it’s portrayed as a video repository created by and for teens. Indeed, nearly every single one of its top-earning creators is under the age of 20, and polls have found that it ranks second only to Snapchat as U.S. teens’ favorite social media app.
Zarna Garg is an exception to the rule in multiple ways. For one, she’s a 45-year-old mom who barely even knew TikTok existed a year ago. And while most top users traffic in dance videos, lip syncs, and comedy sketches, Zarna’s specialty is standup comedy. Many of her jokes aim to capture the South Asian immigrant experience, and she says she’s carved out a niche explored by very few comedians, both inside the U.S. and in India.
I interviewed Zarna about how she cracked the TikTok algorithm, what impact her success has had on her comedy career, and how she’s leveraging that success to try to break into Hollywood.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.
How she got into standup comedy
Zarna forged a circuitous path into standup comedy, not even entering the scene until her 40s. Before she had kids, she was a Manhattan litigation attorney, and though she considered reentering law once her kids reached school age, her heart wasn’t in it. It was her daughter who convinced her to try standup. “People have told me my whole life that I'm funny, but if you're Indian, that means nothing. That's like saying to somebody, ‘you have a sunny disposition.’ What do you do with that? But my daughter said to me one day, ‘why don't you try comedy?’ And I thought she was crazy. I was like, what are you talking about? What am I going to go up there and say? Nothing I say is going to be interesting to anybody anyway. And she kind of pushed me and said, ‘why don't you at least try it?’ And I have no idea how I ended up in the basement of a Mexican restaurant at an open mic. I mean, it's all one big blur now. I showed up and I stood in line and I wanted to see what was going on.”
In those early days, Zarna pulled jokes from a screenplay she’d written and wove them into her act. She paid attention to which jokes landed and gradually began to refine her set. She also proved to be a good study of the business of standup comedy. “In order to get on a show, any show, you've got to bring people. It's called a bringer show. Basically they'll give you five minutes or 10 minutes, depending on how many people you bring in, because essentially the clubs need to recover their costs with the drinks and the food and all of that. So I did one or two shows, and an Indian woman comedian is so rare that the minute I put the word out in my community, like 5,000 people showed up. I only needed five, but when I put the word out, 85 people showed up.”
Eventually, Zarna graduated from open mics and began producing her own shows; they almost immediately turned a profit. “If you don't produce your own show, I don't know how you make money in comedy. I had to figure out how I was going to make money if I'm bringing so many people in, and after a point it is a business. I have to be strategic with my Instagram, my posting, my recruitment, all that goes into bringing people into a club, right? So I started approaching clubs and saying, ‘what will it take for you to give me this club for the night? How many tickets would I have to sell?’ They all said, ‘if you can sell more than 30% of the room or 40% of the room, then we won't charge you anything, the entire ticket is yours.” In return, they got to keep the money from food and drinks. “So it was a great deal for both of us and more clubs became interested in having me because I could pull crowds even on a Tuesday or Wednesday night when most comedians couldn’t.”
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Why she began posting her standup to TikTok
At her most successful, Zarna was performing upwards of six nights a week, but then the pandemic hit, shutting down all clubs and, by extension, standup comedy. So she got more serious about social media. Her initial focus was on Instagram. “If I did a 10 minute set, I chopped up the whole 10 minute set and I put it out in small bits. It started with my little community, and then they forwarded the videos to their friends, and then they forwarded to their friends.” She started strategically watching the analytics, paying attention to which jokes were getting the most traction overall. Social media, in other words, served as a focus group for her comedy.
Zarna was barely aware of TikTok’s existence before her kids introduced her to it. “My 14-year-old said to me, ‘Mom, you should put your jokes on TikTok.’ I had thought it was just 14-year-old girls with dances and songs, but he said there were lots of comedians on TikTok. He helped me get started, and on a lark, I put one or two jokes out there just to see what happens.” She went to bed after posting one night and woke up to discover it had gone viral. “Within a few days, it had over 2 million views.”
So she began posting more and more videos of her standup. It helped that her jokes were perfectly formatted for TikTok. “There is a setup, there's a buildup, there's a punchline, there's a tag. I edit all my jokes to fit that 55 second parameter. I think it works because there are so many people doing music and dance, so my jokes come as a refreshing change.”
How she’s leveraging her newfound stardom
Now that Zarna has over 120,000 TikTok followers, she’s expanding onto other platforms. “I'm doing a little bit of sketch comedy, which is already on Instagram. I'm trying to create alternative ways to film stand up material. I also do a lot of Zoom shows right now. People book me for their family events. They hire me to come in for like a 20 minute, 30 minute gig, and I do jokes specifically for them. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way for me to capture those Zoom moments that are really doing well.”
She’s also trying to break into traditional Hollywood, though it still relies on anachronistic barriers to entry. “I haven't really had any agents and managers call me. I think they don't really know what to do with me. But that basically has propelled me to create my own business. I didn't wait for an agent to come help me option my script. I'm sure it would help if managers and agents got involved, which they, for whatever reason, choose not to at this stage, but that doesn't really stop me.” Having such a large TikTok following helps her get noticed. “The fact that I can point to something like my TikTok and say, well, look at my numbers -- it helps. It's not going to close the deal, but it's going to help for sure. It will get me through the door.”
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.