‘Dazzling New Talents’: Two Indian American Stand-up Comedians Among Variety’s ‘10 Comics to Watch’ List
- Zarna Garg and Nimesh Patel are among “dazzling new talents who are lighting up the live scene, as well as the bold and daring in other myriad forms.”
Zarna Garg and Nimesh Patel are among Variety’s ‘10 Comics to Watch,’ an annual list comprising stand-up comedians, writers and content creators. According to Steven Gaydos, senior VP of global content/executive editor of Variety, this year’s list “showcases dazzling new talents who are lighting up the live scene, as well as the bold and daring in other myriad forms.”
Garg, a TikTok comedy sensation with over 100 million views and 510.7k followers, is “an Indian immigrant mom stand-up comedian who believes brown women everywhere have a right to laugh at anything and anyone they want,” Variety says. “
She performs clean family-friendly comedy while wearing her kurta and bindi on stage and draws you into her authentic Indian world full of ironies, merciless maternal advice, and fresh observations on American life.”
In her Amazon special “One in a Million,” she takes on matchmaking, entitled kids, clueless husbands, mean aunties and tyrannical mothers-in-law. She won Kevin Hart’s Lyft Comics comedy competition on Peacock and the 2021 Ladies of Laughter Newcomer Award.
She also won the Top Comedy Feature Screenplay Award at the 2019 Austin Film Festival and was a Nicholl Fellowships Semi-Finalist. A regular at the iconic Comedy Cellar and Carolines on Broadway in New York City, she has performed in Las Vegas and the famed Kennedy Center and is currently touring nationwide.
Patel, who is on his “The Fast and Loose Tour” has written for “Saturday Night Live” and the Academy Awards; he self-released the special “Lucky Lefty” about being diagnosed with testicular cancer. Based in New York City, the comedian and Emmy-nominated writer has performed standup comedy for more than a decade.
In standup, he is a regular at New York’s famed Comedy Cellar, has appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and has opened for Chris Rock & Aziz Ansari. His first writing job came after Chris Rock saw him perform standup and hired him directly to write for The Academy Awards in 2016. Since then, he has written for Saturday Night Live, The White House Correspondent’s Dinner, & Awkwafina, and was a producer for “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.”
This year’s honorees will be profiled in a special comedy issue of Variety on July 19 and then will be honored at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, held in Montreal July 14-29.