Kaling Physics: The Quantum Comedy of The Mindy Project

A few years ago, I was at a business dinner in Beverly Hills with half a dozen people. The dinner lasted long over drinks, with bonding and truthful talk about our work punctuated by big laughs. Near the end of the dinner, I noticed B.J. Novak and Mindy Kaling having a late dinner at back-corner table.

Many, many, many, many, many years earlier, I’d worked with one of the producers of The Office when he was a puppeteer at Disneyland, and I’d managed a tour on which he met the young woman he would eventually marry. Kent and Shelley were their names. After the drinks, it did not take much of a self-told yarn for me to convince myself that Kent and Shelley would be Surprised and Delighted to have B.J. and Mindy tell them a Rando from the Past says hey.

So —

I did the most asshole thing I could possibly do. The biggest no-no there is.

I interrupted their dinner.

In a restaurant and a table they’d no doubt chosen just so this type of thing did not happen, I strolled right on over and smithereened whatever they’d been talking about so I could inquire about my ‘friends,’ Kent and Shelley.

I still cringe at the thought. My only solace is that when I got back to our table, everyone was all, “Do you know them?!’ and I was all —

“Yes. Yes I do.”

It must’ve been around the time they were developing The Mindy Project. I never followed her there. It felt disloyal to The Office. She left Dunder Mifflin and was working at another place now. Whatever, Mindy.

And then, last week, after a series of romances with The Americans, Broadchurch, Master of None, Schitt’s Creek, Mrs. America, The Chicago Seven, TV shows from the 1960s and Queens Gambit, I decided to take a look at The Mindy Project.

Maybe it was made for pandemic viewing. For me, it’s like Mindy Kaling just walked out of the UFO on The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu Barada Nikto, girl. The series ran from 2012–2017. I’m glad I didn’t see it in the Before Times. It feels like an essential tonic for Now.

Here’s how —

She’s re-telling her mom’s story. Her mom is an Ob-Gyn doctor like the one Mindy plays on her series. There are scenes in the series that could only have been written by the daughter of the woman it’s about. It is snarky and disrespectful of a profession like only the child of that profession can be. My best friend’s father was a surgeon. When a family member went into surgery, my friend thought nothing of scrubbing up barging into the operating room to look over the surgeon’s shoulder and ask questions, keep a sponge count, make sure the anesthetist was awake, and generally make a nuisance of himself. My friend was the funniest person I’ve ever known. His family the funniest family. He passed away at the beginning of the pandemic. Mindy reminds me of him and his family. For this, I am grateful. In a pandemic, family stories are very important.

She’s a woman entrepreneur. By portraying a professional in a stressed profession (who isn’t?), she takes on all the angst that’s out there about our work and turns it into comedy. She is a surgeon operating on male-dominated business models by scoping us through our funny bones. (Who knew they can go in through the elbow?) She does it with love, but she is savage about sending up every “I know what to do I just need you people to do it” command-and-control leadership mode that’s ever been. As a partner in a small business, her character’s behaviors seem scattershot to the guys, but she is big on peripheral vision, and understands that opportunity seldom comes in through the front door. Her character shows us that when we’re open to it, serendipity can save the day. And reminds us that such gifts from the gods are as likely to come in the form of the total humiliation as they are in the form of found money.

She’s a comedy physicist. Mark Twain once said, “Humor equals Tragedy plus Time.” Like an Indian-American Female Einstein Also With Signature Hair, Mindy has shifted the equation. In the Twain Equation, when a specific duration of Time had passed after the Tragedy, the Comedy would form.

In Kaling Physics, Time is non-linear.

This means the series can be funnier today, during the pandemic than it would’ve been in 2012. Against the stillness of a quarantine, the time elements of the show — its ticking clocks of romance and work — feel more urgent, more compressed.

Additionally, in Kaling Physics the humor has both particle (a one-line zinger) and wave (the theme of an episode) properties, and it can be both at the same time. The series does not unfold along a timeline, as much as it reveals itself with variably-timed jolts of tragedy that play out in a non-linear way. A party (denied a viewer now, which hurts) turns on an embarrassing event from the past (Mindy’s character had ‘em) and lands with an extra big laugh. As my friend, the visual effects artist Richard Taylor, used to say of the movie Tron, “It reminds us of something we’ve never seen before.” This is, I believe, due to the constantly-shifting elements of time and tragedy that bring unexpected relevance the comedy.

She’s brave as can be. You know how behavioral scientists always say Fear of Speaking in Public is one of the biggest fears a human being can face? Multiply that Fear times an audience of, basically, the entire world, and you can sense the enormity of what a writer/performer must confront in putting herself out there with such ruthless honesty as Mindy Kaling does. There is a saying in improv comedy, “Follow the fear.” I believe it was Del Close who used to say it. What it means is that on the other side of your fear is a world of possibilities you cannot see when Fear stands in your way. Mindy has given Fear two black eyes and walked right on through to the party on the other side. What she discovers there makes us all braver for having experienced it.