Mindy Kaling’s meta, multilayered Late Night is a comedy about comedy. In the movie, which she wrote and coproduced, Kaling stars as Molly Patel, a chemical-plant employee who lands her dream job as a writer for Tonight, hosted by Katherine Newbury (a delightfully spiky Emma Thompson). Late Night is funny. There are jokes. But in a way, it’s also a horror film. On Molly’s first day, the otherwise all-white, all-male writing staff assumes she’s a new assistant. Once her coworkers realize she’s not there to take their coffee orders, they play a petulant game of “You can’t sit with us”—literally. She eventually finds a trash can to plop down on.
Meanwhile, her new boss might have her own stage and a Miranda Priestly swagger (Katherine doesn’t know any of her writers’ names, choosing instead to identify them by number), but we soon find out that her house is also haunted. Ratings are tanking; the network wants to replace her with a boorish dude who makes bad poop jokes; and a past indiscretion threatens her relationship with the only person she cares about, her kindly, ailing husband (John Lithgow). Even her vaunted career isn’t the summit it seems—after accepting a lifetime achievement award, Katherine celebrates by slouching into a booth of a nearby bar alone. Her shoes pinch. Her Spanx are cutting off her blood supply. Being the only woman around isn’t all that cozy, it turns out.
Thankfully, a clutch of hilarious films—all written and directed by women, all featuring heroines who have brown skin or are queer or Asian American or larger than a size 0—have arrived this summer to shift the balance. Welcome to the woke comedy revolution.
Take Netflix’s Always Be My Maybe, in which childhood best friends Sasha (Ali Wong) and Marcus (Randall Park) sleep together as teens, fight, then part ways. Upon reuniting 15 years later, they discover a tiny flame has been burning the whole time. It’s a familiar-feeling rom-com, but it features two Asian leads. Apart from Crazy Rich Asians, it’s basically the only one out there. The film’s cowriters, Wong, Park, and screenwriter/playwright Michael Golamco (Cowboy Versus Samurai, Grimm), take that honor seriously, littering the script with jokes about closefisted Asian parents and everyday details that are striking simply because they’ve rarely appeared onscreen—like when Sasha, ranting about an ex, snaps apart her disposable chop-sticks and furiously rubs them against each other in a gesture known to any patron of down-market Asian restaurants.
This bouquet of cultural touchstones can feel a little overwhelming at times, but one understated moment makes it all worthwhile. A montage of a young Sasha and Marcus mugging in photo booths might be unremarkable apart from its soundtrack, a cover of David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” That’s who they are, of course, but they haven’t looked like that in the movies before.
Olivia Wilde’s scampy, joyous feature film directorial debut, Booksmart, sweeps the spotlight over nerdy girls coming of age in a refreshing twist on the straight-male-dominated genre. High school valedictorian and class president Molly (yes, another Molly, played by Beanie Feldstein, cherubic face perfectly punctuated by an overachiever’s laser-beam eyes) and her BFF Amy (played by Kaitlyn Dever with a knife-through-the-heart level of awkwardness) are straight-A students whose pregraduation plans include binge-watching a Ken Burns documentary. (Afterward, Molly will head off to Yale, and Amy to Botswana for some gap-year aid work, naturally.)
But when Molly overhears her classmates’ unflattering opinions of her in the gender-neutral restroom, she lets Amy know there’s been a change of plans: “The Dust Bowl can wait!” They are going to party. And as the duo’s Good Ship Self-Discovery grounds itself on kooky detours and hallucinogenic highs, Breakfast Club–esque epiphanies light their way. The mean girl? Not really mean—just cynical and bullied. The basket case? Okay, maybe Billie Lourd’s transcendentally bizarre Gigi is a pure weirdo, but she’s also loyal as hell. Taking Booksmart to some of its most tender territory, though, is Amy’s intense crush on Ryan (Victoria Ruesga), a cheerful, mop-topped skater girl. Infatuation leads her down a twisty road of tension and disappointment, but ultimately pays off in a classic “geek gets the girl” moment.
Booksmart feels gossamer-light, but its achievement is weighty. Go ahead, take the scant seconds you’ll need to count the teen comedies that center on a queer girl’s longings. Or, for that matter, the number of mainstream rom-coms with Asian leads. Or brown women breaking barriers in late night (hello, Lilly Singh). Thank goodness for new ideas about who gets to be, learn, love, and joke in Hollywood. Here are three films that prove what was obvious to so many of us for so long—that anyone can be funny, and earn a happy ending, too.
Late Night is in theaters on June 7; Always Be My Maybe premieres on Netflix on May 31; Booksmart is out now.
This article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of ELLE.