Carlos Mencia

[faceless]

Mencia Doesn't Mind Being Controversial
September 04, 2009
By Mark Jordan

As a comic, Carlos Mencia seems to have one setting: On. Even a casual question about how he's doing elicits a 5-minute routine about his father. "I'm trying to be bummed out by all the stuff that I see on the news, but it's kind of hard when you've got an immigrant father who sees all this stuff from a different perspective," says Mencia , who brings his stand-up act to Tunica's Sam's Town Casino for two shows tonight. "My dad told me the other day, 'Did you know there's no word for clunker in Spanish?' And I'm like what? 'There's no word for clunker.' What do you mean? 'You either have a car and are a badass, or you walk.'"

Mencia's go-for-broke comic instinct has helped make him one of the most popular and successful comedians in recent memory, with a CableACE Award and, until recently, a hit Comedy Central show. But he is also one of the most controversial, the target of frequent charges over offensive material and even plagiarism. His act, full of racial stereotyping punctuated with his trademark "dee, dee, dee" but with an undercurrent of proud patriotism, is polarizing among comedy fans. In 2006 Maxim magazine voted Mencia the 12th-worst comic of all time while the same year Comedy Central viewers selected him the second-best.

For his part, Mencia prefers to let the criticism roll off of him. "With success comes all that stuff," he says. "I feel bad for some of those people who really hate me, the ones who watch every single thing that I do and write back to me about every single episode that I've ever been in and every single movie I've ever done. I actually tell them you need to get a life, dude. You hate, but you spend so much time on me. It's like we're lovers."

Born in Honduras, the 17th of 18 children, Mencia, 41, inherited his comic sense from his father. "The only person I was ever funny with was my dad, but I was never that funny with him because he was pre-empting me. He always had the joke that I was thinking of in my head," Mencia remembers. "If I stole my act from anybody, it's my dad. I totally ripped him off, but I bought him a house so he can totally kiss my ass."

After immigrating to America, Mencia worked for years in the clubs, on late-night talk shows, and in guest appearances on sitcoms before he broke through in 2005 with his own Comedy Central show, "Mind of Mencia." Taking the time slot of the beloved Dave Chappelle, the program quickly became one of the network's top- rated shows thanks to its host's unique blend of ethnic, lowbrow, and topical humor. After four successful seasons, however, Mencia surprised many by walking away from the show earlier this year.

"I've got to change with the times," he says of the decision. "I feel like I've got to grow. . I don't want to be doing the same thing for 10 years. It's not my style. I can't do it."

Mencia's first post-Comedy Central project is the film "Family Wedding," a 2010 release that has the comic acting opposite Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker. He is also preparing a new stand-up special for which his Tunica show will be a warm-up. "I'm never going to stop doing stand-up," he says. "There's noting like an unfiltered, uncensored moment in time where I can put together an exact show of exactly what I want, exactly how I want it and nobody can tell me what or how to do it."

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there's no doubt that some people are totally hooked on Mencia - for the negative reasons he mentions here. Joe Rogan, for example, thinks he's on some kind of crusade and will take every opportunity to attack him - mostly because he's a jealous little man who thinks he's funnier. Thing is, Rogna goes on about originality etc, but where' the originality in him talking about conspiracy theories, taking drugs and having gay sex?

[pirtybirdy]

I love Carlos Mencia. I went to see him in NYC, and he had me howling the whole night. He cracked me up. I'm not a follower as such, so I don't know if he is consistently funny, but I can say without a doubt he was funny on that night, and a couple of stand ups that I have seen on Comedy Central.