Mindy Kaling opens up on feeling excluded from comedy cliques in early career

Accomplished comedian and writer Mindy Kaling once felt left out of comedy cliques.

Kaling, whose rise to fame came with her role in The Office, shared that she wasn’t a part of any comedy cliques in the early 2000s, and that became a driving factor in her determination to do wonders as a comedian.

"I was really jealous and I had a chip on my shoulder about it. Because in that aughts time [the early 2000s], you were in a clique or you weren't. I was on The Office, so maybe people were like, 'Well, she's there,' and maybe you could argue that that was a clique," Kaling told Dax Shepard during her recent appearance on The Armchair Expert podcast.

"But the writing stuff was very competitive with each other. We all had our own private ambitions, our own stuff we wanted to do. We wanted to write the best scripts, kill the table read, have Steve Carell think we were the funniest writer," she explained.

She shared: “I was jealous of Judd [Apatow] and Seth [Rogen] and Jason [Segel] and then there was Amy [Poehler] and Tina [Fey], and Will [Ferrell] doing the ice-skating movie ... I felt like the entire aughts was me coming up on a show that I loved but being like, 'Why can't I be in a clique?' "

"It really fueled me in a good and bad way, where I was like, 'I don't have Lorne [Michaels], I don't have Judd. I don't have any of these people who are going to do something for me. I gotta do it myself. I'm gonna show them all.' "

And show them she did! Mindy Kaling went on to create the megahit Netflix series Never Have I Ever, as well as other comedy shows like Running Point, and Sex Lives of College Girls.