Mindy Kaling – America’s Sweetest Sweetheart

Last year, a Twitter account (and resulting YouTube video) changed the lives of women forever. “Shit girls say” held a mirror to the female population and said, “This is what you actually sound like.” After spending weeks saying, “I do NOT sound like that” and giving the evil eye to every man that crossed their path, women began to embrace the image. Yes, we do like puppies and romantic comedies and pretending to exercise. Get over it. The result of this revolution is Mindy Kaling.

Mindy Kaling| Promotional Photo via FOX

Kaling’s first break came when she became a writer and actor (she plays the queen of the one-liners Kelly Kapor) for The Office for eight years. She’s responsible for some of the best episodes, including Niagra (if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this and watch it now). In her new show The Mindy Project, Kaling embraces all things girly, silly and real about women. Her character Dr. Mindy Lahiri is an intelligent and hardworking doctor looking for balance and love – sounds a lot like what most women want, right? Though her life may not be the rom-com she envisions (her friend says it seems more like a “sad documentary about a criminally insane spinster”), Mindy Lahiri is a more realistic interpretation of a working woman than characters like Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope.

Kaling, however, found her voice through everyone’s favorite social media site, Twitter. Her quirky tweets about wearing the same outfit twice in two days, or fake tweets from this year’s New York fashion week, resonate with women on a personal level – they’re not funny because they’re weird; they’re funny because they’re you. Kaling’s book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), tells stories about exercising (“Even in my revenge fantasy where all I do is exercise, I can still do only twenty-five pull-ups. Pull-ups are tough, no joke”), men (“I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying, non-Velcro-shoe-wearing man”), and film (“I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world”).

For years, men have used women as the butt of jokes – My girlfriend made me watch “The Notebook” and I wanted to kill myself. Har-dee-har-har. Instead of shying away from the topics of conversation that women love, but men hate, Kaling embraces it, shoves it in your face and makes you laugh with it.

 

The Mindy Project airs September 25 at 9:30 pm on Fox. Mindy Kaling’s twitter is available here, and her book is available on Amazon.

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