Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Zarna Garg: One In A Billion’ On Prime Video, An Indian Immigrant Mom Releases Her Debut Comedy Special

Five years ago, Zarna Garg was a stay-at-home mother of three. Now she has her debut comedy special premiering globally via Amazon Prime Video. Is this a reboot of the 1988 movie Punchline, except Sally Field’s role is being played by an immigrant from India? If so, are we OK leaving out Tom Hanks? Never mind that. Let’s focus on the real and now.

ZARNA GARG: ONE IN A BILLION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Garg left India as a teenager, coming to America, going to law school, and then becoming a wife and mother for 16 years before her eldest daughter convinced her to leave the home and try stand-up comedy.

Since then, Garg has amassed 705,000 followers on TikTok, almost as many on Instagram, and appeared on Peacock via Kevin Hart’s Lyft Comics competition series, and on Apple TV+ via Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s Gutsy docuseries. In the past year, she has been featured on the TODAY show and radio’s This American Life. But this hour for Prime Video represents Garg’s first full stand-up showcase for most viewers.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Garg stands up in stark contrast to other comedians who are immigrants or mothers because she’s both, providing a different perspective to the many stand-ups who joke about being the children of immigrants.

Memorable Jokes: Garg doesn’t wait long before making the titular joke, that when you come from a nation of 1.4 billion residents, “one in a million” doesn’t feel like that much of a compliment. She tags that by asking Americans to imagine adding a billion more people into the country: “Then ask yourself how pro-life you would be.” She later returns with a more direct comparison, suggesting: “Go to Kolkata for one day. New York will feel like a fun little village.”

Many jokes rely either on the contrasting beliefs between India and America, or more directly on the differences between immigrant moms in America versus American moms.

So we get to learn a lot about how Garg has raised her three kids, from her oldest daughter attending Stanford University, to her handsome high-school son and her “forgettable” younger son.

STEM jokes. Spelling jokes and Spelling Bee jokes. Mother-in-law jokes abound. Garg plugs her TikTok account, but also reveals that her mother-in-law stalks her there.

And Garg also takes playful aim at how Americans turned yoga into a “blood sport,” inventing things such as hot yoga, saying “namaste” all wrong, and just generally missing the point of the ancient fitness practice.

Our Take: Much of Garg’s act focuses on the advantages of being practical as a parent, rather than encouraging kids to follow their dreams.

She even takes a dig at one particular unnamed child of immigrants who Garg says was the first “brown comic” she ever saw performing stand-up, claiming that their generation only whines about their parents. “We call them ABCDs…American Born Confused Daisies,” Garg tells us. “What it should stand for is Always Bitching and Complaining Dumb-Dumbs.” In contrast, Garg wants to redefine second-generation Americans insults of their parents from “Fresh Off The Boat” to “Full of Benjamins,” because it’s immigrant mothers and fathers like Garg who are subsidizing their kids’ dreams. Garg even points to a list of current CEOs, dominated by Indian-Americans, and asks if any of them got to pick their own majors or follow their dreams.

The irony, of course, is that Garg admits early in the hour of dreaming of “Coming to America” just like Eddie Murphy, then revealing just past the hour mark of how she escaped a potential arranged marriage as a teen in India, and decades after actually coming to America herself, is now following her dream as a comedian thanks to her own daughter. Or as she puts it, “my sweet destiny” of becoming “an American loudmouth woman!”

Our Call: There are millions of immigrant parents out there who will eagerly STREAM IT, because those are the same Aunties whom Garg thanks in a shout-out for helping her career get to this point. That said, this is a debut special (and one that credits a co-writer, Cory Kahaney, a fellow mom who made the finals of the inaugural season of NBC’s Last Comic Standing two decades ago), so it’s not yet capturing Garg at her full potential. Whatever and wherever that may be. And I cannot help but question why Amazon didn’t capitalize on Mother’s Day weekend by releasing this a few days earlier. Then again, that’s such an American thing to think, right?

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.