Mindy Kaling is TV’s Patron Saint of Celebration

Every couple of months, I fall into a cycle of obsessing over Mindy Kaling in which I adore her in an aspirational way. She inhabits vibrancy. She writes comedy with the joy of loving it and with intelligence, proving that joy contains as much complexity as sorrow. Kaling is effortful, championing ambition met with hard-work and grace as her pathway to accomplishment. I think about something she wrote or said at least once a day. Yet in a flippant remark to Julie the other day I accidentally synopsized why I love Mindy Kaling in a simple sentence—Mindy Kaling is a goddess, a patron saint of celebration. This celebration, the love of loving things, originates from Kaling's own confidence and is infused into her TV characters. I now invoke the muse of TV comedy writing and my favorite person that I have never met, Mindy Kaling.

Kaling is never short of opinions or favorite things. She remembers, “When I was a kid, I would always write down lists of my favorite things and keep them in my wallet, just in case someone ever needed to know what my 10 favorite foods were, or my 10 favorite actors,” understanding that loving things constructs a personhood, and that knowledgeable opinions flower self-confidence. Truly, though, she loves to talk about things she loves and creates little idolizations through language. For instance, Kaling had a “Things I’ve Bought that I Love” blog on and off which her debut book deal that became Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? partially stemmed from. Her essays from both books are full of anecdotes and lists: a detailed contract of friendship (she will hate and re-like people for you, will share planning activities responsibilities), what she wishes people would bring to dinner parties (an old photo of Colin Firth, one of a shared memory), and strict funeral instructions (no exes unless they’re truly devastated). She is never lacking in specificity. Mike Schur, a fellow writer on The Office and creator of other amazing shows, attests to Mindy’s early confidence as a staff writer, “What was sort of remarkable about Mindy was that she was the first one who started acting confidently, like she knew what was going on. I think that she just decides she can do something and then does it.” But Mindy views her season 1 of The Office self as insecure, unconfident because she didn't have the work experience to feel confident yet. Kaling asserts that confidence is something to be gained with hard work, “Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.” Every opportunity Kaling has had, she has manifested herself. They’ve been procured by her own merit. And of course, she has 4 a.m. anxiety like the rest of us, and these are all the wonderful things she represents to me but really not the fullness of who she is. She is only a person, but one that owns her colors, her confidence, her outrages, herself. And once one has studied, prepared, to harness confidence, it can be a choice, a feeling that is no longer largely uncomfortable but a beautifier reaped from hard work.

Kaling's own particularities and confidence are imbued into the characters she has written throughout her television career. She likes her characters to be grand, intensely loveable and intensely flawed. She writes, “My favorite shows have a flawed and ridiculous lead who is steering the comedy of the show, making big mistakes and then struggling to fix them,” and those are the kind of shows she writes. In The Office, Michael Scott is bumbling and petulant, but he really cares about his employees. In The Mindy Project, Mindy Lahiri is selfish and indignant, but ambitious; she matures and changes throughout the series into a more patient human. In Hulu’s 2019 Four Weddings and a Funeral, Maya is indecisive and impulsive; she gains bravery in asking for forgiveness and pursuing love. In Never Have I Ever, Devi is short-fused and self-focused, but in navigating her own grief is apologetic, trying to be better. And all of these characters are each legit funny. They're idiots and their idiocy is on full display. Even in their ridiculousness, they’re confident, “One thing that is different from other shows is that my character [Mindy Lahiri] is weirdly, extremely confident. She feels like she should be dating Chris Evans. That’s something I learned from writing for Michael Scott. He thought he was going to marry Teri Hatcher, even though he was constantly being told that was not the case.”This ego makes for great comedy as well as that sparkling, winsome quality you want to watch in a protagonist that emulates from Kaling herself.

Besides affinity for terms like “uggo,” “perv,” and “weirdo” to tack on the end of jokes, the innovation of the Socratic Method in “How dare you?” or “Whoa” as a fully formed response, Kaling’s characters are more than just confetti machines of jokes; they are effusive in loving things. B.J. Novak, writer on The Office and life-long friend of Kaling’s, details Mindy’s salinant voice in writing on The Office in saying:

She came up with Michael having a man-crush on Ryan. That was one of the first impacts she made on the show. It wasn’t building to any punch line. It wasn’t going to climax in any actual gay incident. It was just a weird dynamic that she could picture. I think that helped push the show into embracing odd, lifelike changes...But Mindy had a very big role in sort of delightful tangents. That is very much her voice. Another example of Mindy’s voice is that she loves characters to love things. Michael loved Ryan. That was very Mindy just because it was someone randomly loving something.

Randomly loving something hearkens back to keeping her favorite things list in her wallet; these are acts of celebration, gifts of optimism she bestows to her characters. Kelly Kapoor's fascination with celebrity couples. Mindy Lahiri’s general love of consumerism mirrors Kaling with her own description of her “new money” aesthetic. She also loves writing her characters in festive or ceremonial settings. On The Office, she wrote the Diwali episode in which Kelly invites the whole office to the local Diwali celebration of the Hindu holiday that celebrates the festival of lights. She also insisted on writing the Christmas episodes, writing three of the seven of The Office’s Christmas episodes. In Never Have I Ever, Devi and her family attend the local Ganesh Puja celebration of the Hindu god, Ganesh, during which Devi struggles with her conflicting and coexisting identities as Indian and American. Further, Kaling loves romantic comedies, so rom-com homages are present in all of her shows, but especially in The Mindy Project and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Obviously, Four Weddings is already infixed in the rom-com world by its premise adapted from the 1994 film. The Mindy Project begins with a sequence of young Lahiri’s enthrallment with rom-coms, watching When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and Notting Hill. Then she retells the story of dating Bill Hader’scharacter and giving a comedic outburst of a wedding speech to wind up being arrested for public intoxication after riding her bike straight into a stranger’s pool while fleeing from the scene of the wedding. Chaos! Her leading characters exude chaos: Michael Scott never understanding social cues and harboring grandiose expectations for everything, Maya’s habit of dating men that are already involved with someone else, and Devi’s insistence on losing her virginity to the best abs at her high school in order to not deal with the loss of her father. Yet the swinging mistakes of the main character are rooted in the relational, in love —in romance, in friendship, in family. None of these people are ambivalent; they all care so much. Again, iconic lines of being too much reach the lips of these characters because Kaling is a person that never understood “effortless” as a compliment, but remains effortful. I turn to B.J. Novak again to articulate the brilliance of Kaling’s writing:

Mindy has long been considered the best writer on The Office, and every actor on the show thinks she writes for them best. There is the extra little ‘smile’ that infuses her scripts, which is hard to quantify. My guess is that it stems from a real loving sense of the super specific inner life of every character. Characters aren't joke machines to her, or types to satirize. As a person, she's incredibly sentimental, more than anyone I’ve met, but she's also incredibly sharp. She's unabashedly both. That allows her to express real emotions without shyness, but also without clichés.

Watching her shows is hella fun and encapsulates how skillful she is at generating hilarity. I implore you to watch them. The specificity of favorites and obsessions and sentimentality are foundational in Kaling’s characters and create a lovable quality in the hot-mess protagonists that evoke a sense of celebration in their successes. It’s a persuasive technique; you root for them. It is also effective because the material beautifully reflects the originator. This meta-fictional interpersonal relationship is common among writers, but none have done it as brightly or pervasively in the television landscape as Mindy Kaling. What a fount of mirth.