Parikh began improvising and writing sketches for the short-lived comedy troupe The Village Idiots at Brown University. In 2001 he wrote and produced his first film, The Courier Dodge, which was a finalist at the Ivy Film Festival for Best Comedy. He was awarded the Capstone at Brown for writing the feature screenplay Chess Wesley. After graduating, he lived in Brooklyn, New York, and wrote plays, one of which was produced at the Lower Tenement Theatre in Manhattan. Unable to ignore the calls of Hollywood, he moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and wrote, directed, and produced an independent television pilot called The Good Guys. This landed him his agent at the William Morris Agency. In July 2006 he founded Effinfunny.com where he produced stand-up comedy shows in Los Angeles and edited the best bits into digestible clips for the Internet and created profiles for the comedians for promotional purposes. While in Los Angeles, he was roommates with Milana Vayntrub.

Parikh created, co-wrote, and directed The Legend of Neil about a real-world slacker who gets sucked into The Legend of Zelda and has to fight his way out with a wooden sword and no discernible skills. He wrote the 4-minute short as a web pilot for VH1’s Acceptable.tv. The show was cancelled before the Legend of Neil was eligible to air but it won best Sci Fi Fantasy Web Pilot for the Acceptable.tv podcast. The show was then a YouTube sensation amassing over a quarter million hits. It was soon picked up by Comedy Central for 5 more webisodes that were released in July 2008 on Atom.com. A second season, commissioned by Comedy Central, was released by Atom.com in 2009. A third season followed, premiering in July 2010.

In 2009, Parikh appeared in an episode of Community. In the end credits scene of the season one episode “Debate 109,” he appears as “Abed’s Abed,” playing Abed in one of his films and performing the Spanish rap from the end of “Spanish 101” with “Abed’s Troy.”

In 2016, Parikh starred as a co-host in AWE me’s web series Super Fan Builds.

In 2020, he wrote an episode of Glitch Techs and voices Haneesh.