COMEDIAN, ACTRESS, AND AUTHOR UNITED STATESI have a personality defect where I sort of refuse to see myself as an underdog. . . . It’s because of my parents. They raised me with the entitlement of a tall, blond, white man.
—MINDY KALING
Mindy and Mavis stared at the TV. Onscreen was an old woman in an ugly purple-and-blue dress and a grey wig, sitting in front of a stained-glass window. She spoke in a nasally voice, scolding and shaming her guests. At the end of the skit, she did an embarrassing dance around the stage like an oversized chicken fluffing its feathers.
The girls couldn’t stop laughing. The Church Lady was their favorite, so they stayed up late on the weekends to watch her on Saturday Night Live. As they got ready for bed after the show, they were still laughing.
Mavis poked her toothbrush into Mindy’s face and whined in the Church Lady voice, “How con-VEEN-ient!”
Mindy laughed so hard she sprayed water on the mirror. She pointed her own toothbrush back at Mavis and said, “Could it be . . . SATAN?!?”
Both girls busted into the Church Lady dance, strutting around the bathroom, laughing, and repeating the Church Lady’s most famous catchphrase, “Well, isn’t that SPE-CIAL?” over and over again.
Suddenly, Mindy’s mom was standing in the doorway. “What in the world are you girls yelling about?” She was a doctor and had to get up early to go to the hospital. Looks like they’d woken her up with their silliness. It wasn’t the first time.
The teens froze mid-dance. Then Mindy looked at her very serious mother and repeated (in her best Church Lady voice), “Hey Mom, isn’t that SPE-CIAL?”
Her mother rolled her eyes and said, “Can you please stop saying ‘Isn’t that special?’ in that strange voice. It is annoying to me and to others.” This made Mindy and Mavis crack up even harder. They laughed so hard they couldn’t breathe. Finally, Mindy’s mom shook her head in disgust and went to bed.1
Today, Mindy Kaling is one of the funniest people on the planet, but she wasn’t born a comedian. She didn’t catch the comedy bug until high school, when she watched comedy shows obsessively with her BFF. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a very normal house. Her mother, a doctor, and her father, an architect, had moved to America from India the year Mindy was born. They worked hard and sent Mindy to a private school. They expected she might grow up to be a doctor or lawyer—some respectable, serious career like theirs.
She was never the class clown. Quite the opposite—she was a model student who excelled in Latin. She was the nerd who sat next to the class clown and studied him. She also got teased a lot. Once, a group of bullies even called her a whale. At the time, it bothered her a lot, but not anymore. “If someone called me chubby, it would no longer be something that kept me up late at night. Being called fat is not like being called stupid or unfunny, which is the worst thing you could ever say to me.”2
When she started high school, Mindy discovered her passion for comedy. She and Mavis spent hours and hours watching classic comedy shows like Kids in the Hall, Saturday Night Live, Cheers, and Monty Python. Soon, they were reenacting favorite sketches, which led to writing their own sketches; they videotaped the sketches so they could watch and critique them later. Mindy didn’t know it, but she was teaching herself the skills she would need in her future career.
Mindy’s real name is Vera Mindy Chokalingam. She shortened it when she was first doing stand-up in New York because emcees couldn’t pronounce it. Her mother named her Mindy after the main character in the ’70s TV sitcom Mork and Mindy.
Mindy’s parents had high expectations for her, so she spent a lot of time on homework and studying for tests. She wasn’t super popular, didn’t star in any plays, and wasn’t a cheerleader. She doesn’t have any regrets about being the quiet, hardworking kid though: “What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also a big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.”3
Mindy’s nerdiness paid off. At the end of high school, she was accepted to Dartmouth, one of the top colleges in the country. At Dartmouth, Mindy began showing signs of the star she would one day become. During her four years there, Mindy was in an a cappella group—The Rockapellas—and the school improv group, The Dog Day Players. She wrote for the Dartmouth Jack-o-Lantern, the college humor magazine. She even wrote and illustrated a comic strip in the school newspaper called Badly Drawn Girl. Mindy was a very busy girl!
It was also during college that Mindy got her first showbiz break: she got a summer internship in New York City working for her comic idol, Conan O’Brien, on his talk show Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Mindy was a terrible intern, however. Instead of doing the menial tasks assigned to her, she just watched her hero in action, soaking up his comic genius.
After graduation, Mindy moved to New York City with two best friends from Dartmouth, thinking she’d rule the Big Apple the way she’d ruled college. She was in for a shock. First, she tried writing for some TV shows, but she hated most of the ones that had openings and she wasn’t very good at it. And she quickly discovered that there weren’t many acting options for short, chubby Indian girls.
To actors who don’t fit the mold, Mindy has good advice: “Write your own part. It is the only way I’ve gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It forces you to think about what your strengths really are, and once you find them, you can showcase them, and no one can stop you.”5
After a year or so of not getting anywhere with her dream career, Mindy felt like a total failure. Desperate, she took matters into her own hands and began doing what she’d done back in high school and college: she wrote her own shows and put in parts for herself.
In 2003, Mindy got her second big break: she cowrote and costarred in a play called Matt and Ben with her best friend and roommate, Brenda. It imagined life for actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon before they became superstars, when they were just two friends hanging out. Mindy played Ben Affleck. The play was weird and funny, and audiences loved it. Every night sold out. The New Yorker called it “goofy, funny, and improbably believable.”4
During one performance of Matt and Ben, Mindy accidentally broke Brenda’s nose onstage. Even though Brenda was bleeding all over herself, they finished the show.
The show was such a hit that it traveled to Los Angeles. In the audience one night was LA producer Greg Daniels, who loved the play and invited Mindy to write with him on a new, unknown show he was developing called The Office. Mindy accepted, and at age twenty-four, she moved to LA and became the only woman writer on the show. She also acted on the show as Kelly Kapoor, a superficial, selfish, chatty customer-service rep. Later, she also moved into directing and producing the show. On The Office, Mindy got to do a bit of everything.
Believe it or not, this beloved comedy wasn’t an instant success. It started as a midseason replacement for a different show that got canceled. They only did six shows that first season, and early reviews weren’t great. But The Office got picked up for a second season. Over its nine seasons and 201 episodes, The Office won tons of awards, earned stellar reviews, and became one of the most popular comedies on TV.
Mindy also does a lot of great voice work in animated movies. She’s voiced characters in favorites like Despicable Me, Wreck-It Ralph, and Inside Out.
Mindy loved working on The Office, but she longed for a new challenge. She wanted to be in charge—to make the big decisions about character, dialogue, and direction on a show. In short, she wanted to develop and star in her own TV show. So that’s what she did. In 2012, Mindy left The Office to start The Mindy Project. Mindy wrote, produced, and starred in the romantic sitcom. On it, she played a doctor, like her mother.
Being the writer, producer, and star of her own show was not an easy job. A typical workday for Mindy started at 5 AM, she was in the studio by 6 AM to get her hair and makeup done, and then for the rest of the day, she shot the show and worked on writing episodes. In the evening, after filming and writing, she finished up in the editing room and got home around midnight. Mindy didn’t mind the brutal schedule—she was used to hard work, and she finally had her dream job: “A lot of people ask how to get to where I am, and the single biggest thing, which is not profound, is that I work like a dog.”6
All her hard work paid off. From the start, The Mindy Project received good reviews and award nominations. So far it’s been nominated for a bunch of Emmys and NAACP Awards (which honor nonwhite artists), and it has won the Critics’ Choice TV Award and some Gracie Awards (which honor female artists).
Mindy has also written bestselling and funny (of course) memoirs: Is Everyone Hanging Out without Me? (2011) and Why Not Me? (2015). If you want to learn more about her life and career, check them out!
Mindy is changing TV. She was the first Indian American to write and star in her own network TV show, and she is showing Hollywood that actors don’t have to be white and skinny for audiences to love them. But she isn’t interested in her work being defined by her sex or her ethnicity: “I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists. I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?”7
And Mindy is having no problem competing. She is already one of the most successful writers in Hollywood, male or female, and Time magazine recently put her on its 2013 list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” As the Church Lady would say, “Well, isn’t that SPE-CIAL!”
If you’ve got it, flaunt it. If you don’t got it? Flaunt it. ’Cause what are we even doing here if we’re not flaunting it?
—MINDY KALING
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I’m going to rock the world by becoming a therapist. I will help people by listening to what they have to say and never judging them. I will help guide them down the right path. I think I will be good at it because I’ve been a mini therapist ever since I was able to talk.
TALULAH HENDERSON-BRAZIE 
AGE 12