Zarna Garg did her first open mic in her forties. In December she plays two Melbourne theatres.
The Million Dollar Excuses tour puts Zarna Garg at the National Theatre in St Kilda on 1 and 3 December, then four doors down the road at the Palais on 6 December. Bohm Presents has her doing 10 shows across six venues nationally, opening at the Sydney Opera House on 21 November before the Seymour Centre, Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall and Norwood Concert Hall in Adelaide. Tickets are on sale.
Garg grew up in Mumbai. Her mother died when she was 14 and her father expected her to marry, so she left home instead, spending two years without a permanent address and finishing school off the back of friends’ couches. At 16 she moved to the United States to live with her sister in Akron, Ohio. She took a finance degree at the University of Akron, then a law degree at Case Western Reserve, practised briefly, and stopped for 16 years to raise three kids.
Zarna Garg
- Sydney Opera House, Sydney – 21 November
- Seymour Centre, Sydney – 24 November
- Seymour Centre, Sydney – 25 November
- Seymour Centre, Sydney – 27 November
- Seymour Centre, Sydney – 28 November
- Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane – 29 November
- National Theatre, Melbourne – 1 December
- National Theatre, Melbourne – 3 December
- Norwood Concert Hall, Adelaide – 5 December
- Palais Theatre, Melbourne – 6 December
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
Her kids are the ones who pushed her towards a stage. The screenplay came first: Rearranged, a comedy about arranged marriage, won best comedy screenplay at the Austin Film Festival in 2019 and made the Nicholl Fellowships semi-finals. The open mic followed in 2018, in a New York basement, with her first official set at Carolines on Broadway in February 2019.
Two specials have landed since. One in a Billion went up on Prime Video in 2023 and Practical People Win arrived on Hulu in 2025, opening at number two on the platform. Her memoir This American Woman came out through Penguin Random House in April 2025, hit the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of Amazon’s best books of the year. She reads the audiobook herself.
Every Monday since August 2023 she’s also recorded the Zarna Garg Family Podcast with her husband and three children, now past 150 episodes. The stand-up stays clean enough for a mixed-generation room, which is usually what she gets: family, marriage, immigration and the business of raising American teenagers as an Indian mum. In 2026 she headlined Garden of Laughs at Radio City Music Hall, picked up a Webby People’s Voice award for best shortform video and signed with UTA.
For more information, head here
