Mina Hartong’s Miss Personality has its World Premiere at Cinema Diverse on Friday, September 25 at 2:15 PM in Theatre Two at the Palm Springs Cultural Center. The special runs 45 minutes.
The veteran comedian’s debut special, “Miss Personality,” turns more than two decades of life, love and lesbian comedy into a warm, wonderfully personal screen experience.
PALM SPRINGS, CA (The Hollywood Times) 9/11/26 — After more than two decades making audiences laugh, comedian Mina Hartong has finally captured that unmistakable Mina magic on film, and it feels particularly fitting that Miss Personality, her debut comedy special, is coming back to Palm Springs, the place where it was filmed.
I recently caught up with my longtime friend Mina over Zoom, while I was broadcasting from a Beverly Hills hotel lobby in the middle of Emmy-week madness, to talk about Miss Personality, its upcoming Cinema Diverse screening, queer visibility and what it means to finally preserve more than 20 years of comedy on screen.
Click below for our exclusive interview:
For anyone who has met Hartong, her own introduction tells you almost everything you need to know about her: “I’m Mina Hartong, and my pronouns are she, her, and the fun lesbian aunt you always wanted.”
That playful, welcoming personality is exactly what drives Miss Personality.
Hartong describes the special as something of a “greatest hits” collection drawn from more than 20 years of performing comedy. Rather than feeling like a disconnected collection of old routines, however, Miss Personality comes across as the culmination of a life spent observing people and finding humor in everything from marriage and family to sexuality, aging, teaching and simply trying to make your way through the world.
Hartong draws deeply from her own biography: growing up in Connecticut, her Dutch heritage, her life as a lesbian, her marriage and her years working as a public-school teacher. Those subjects make the comedy unmistakably queer without limiting it to a queer audience. Hartong told me previously that while lesbians and LGBTQ+ women immediately recognize themselves in her material, she increasingly hears from audiences of all backgrounds who connect with it.
That accessibility is one of the special’s strongest qualities.
Hartong doesn’t treat being lesbian as something that requires explanation before the jokes can begin. It is simply part of the world she invites us into. She assumes the audience can keep up, and they do.
The Hollywood Times Review: Miss Personality
As a filmed comedy special, Miss Personality works because it doesn’t try to turn Mina Hartong into something she isn’t.
This isn’t comedy built around cruelty, shock value or seeing how far the performer can push an audience. Hartong’s gift is observational comedy mixed with storytelling, warmth, self-deprecation and a slightly mischievous ability to point out the absurdity of everyday life.
And then there is her personality.
The title couldn’t be more appropriate.
Hartong shared during our conversation that Miss Personality originated with her mother and ultimately developed into something almost larger than a title, a character, an alter ego and, in some ways, an exaggerated version of Mina herself.
On screen, Hartong has the easy confidence of a comedian who has spent years learning how to read a room. There is a conversational quality to her delivery that makes you feel less as though you’re watching someone perform at an audience and more as though you’re sitting at a very funny dinner table where Mina happens to have the microphone.
The live audience is important. Comedy is communal, and Miss Personality benefits enormously from having been recorded in front of packed Palm Springs audiences. You hear people recognizing themselves in the material, and the laughter becomes part of the storytelling rather than merely a soundtrack behind it.
The special was filmed before two sold-out audiences in Palm Springs and was created with a women- and queer-led production and post-production team. That behind-the-scenes representation feels especially appropriate for a project about a woman who has spent much of her career creating more space for LGBTQ+ women in comedy.
There are plenty of laughs, but there is tenderness underneath them.
That’s what separates Miss Personality from a generic stand-up recording. Hartong has reached a stage in her career where she isn’t simply trying to land the next joke. She is telling us who she is.
And she is inviting us to recognize ourselves in the process.
Palm Springs isn’t merely another festival stop for Miss Personality.
Hartong and her wife made the desert their second home, and Mina developed a devoted local following through her performances and Lez Out Loud shows. Filming the special there made sense and bringing it to Cinema Diverse means many members of the community who helped create that energy can now see themselves, quite literally in some cases, on the big screen.
Miss Personality screens at Cinema Diverse: The Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Film Festival on Friday, September 25 at 2:15 p.m. The festival runs September 17–20 and September 24–27 at the Palm Springs Cultural Center.
There is something beautifully circular about that.
The people who laughed with Mina while cameras were rolling now become part of the finished film.
Our conversation also moved beyond comedy.
Hartong spoke passionately about why festivals such as Cinema Diverse remain important, particularly at a time when LGBTQ+ people continue to see hard-won rights and visibility challenged.
Queer festivals aren’t simply places to screen movies. They are places to gather.
They allow LGBTQ+ audiences to sit together and watch stories in which they aren’t a subplot, stereotype or afterthought. And Hartong particularly values the visibility given to queer women, stories she believes have too often received less attention within both mainstream entertainment and LGBTQ+ filmmaking.
That makes Miss Personality particularly well suited to Cinema Diverse.
It isn’t simply a comedy special featuring a lesbian comedian.
It is unapologetically a lesbian comedy special.
There is a difference.
Hartong doesn’t dilute the specificity of her experience in pursuit of a broader audience. Ironically, that specificity is precisely what gives the special its universality.
Marriage is marriage. Mothers are mothers. Families are families. Getting older is getting older.
And funny is funny.
Perhaps the most revealing thing Hartong has said about her work has nothing to do with punch lines.
When I asked what she wanted audiences to feel when they left one of her performances, she told me she hoped they would “feel better” and “feel more connected.”
That idea explains Miss Personality better than any marketing tagline could.
Hartong’s comedy is fundamentally about connection.
She has spent years performing for Olivia Travel audiences, LGBTQ+ communities, women’s events, comedy clubs and festivals around the world. She talks about marriage, Connecticut, teaching and queer life because those are the things she knows, but the destination is always shared laughter.
“The more connected we feel,” she told me, the easier it becomes to get through the world and find more joy. “We need it every day, all day.”
That statement feels particularly meaningful right now. Miss Personality is funny, personal, proudly lesbian and deeply affectionate toward the community that helped Hartong build her career.
But perhaps its greatest pleasure is watching a performer who has put in the years finally get the screen moment she has earned.
There is no sense that Mina Hartong suddenly arrived.
She worked for it.
She taught. She toured. She performed. She wrote. She bombed. She succeeded. She kept going. She built audiences one room at a time and created opportunities for other queer women along the way.
Now the cameras are finally rolling on her.
And Miss Personality captures something wonderfully difficult to manufacture: the feeling that the person entertaining you would probably be just as happy talking with you after the show.
Actually, Mina probably would.
That’s Miss Personality.
And yes, she’s got plenty of it.
Miss Personality screens Friday, September 25 at 2:15 p.m. during Cinema Diverse: The Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Film Festival in Palm Springs. Hartong’s debut comedy special is also being released through Comedy Dynamics on digital and streaming platforms.
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