I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.

Kaling humorously reframes the romantic comedy as a kind of speculative fiction: a universe with its own physics, incentives, and improbably tidy outcomes. By calling it “sci-fi,” she highlights the genre’s reliance on conventions—meet-cutes, misunderstandings that resolve on schedule, grand gestures that work—that can feel alien compared with everyday social life. The line also carries a self-deprecating edge: her “regular human world” suggests she experiences real-world romance as messier, less legible, or less rule-bound than movies imply. The joke becomes a critique of rom-com idealization while still acknowledging the pleasure of entering a stylized, comforting alternate reality.