Carlos Mencia

Carlos Mencia

Ned Arnel Mencía (born October 22, 1967 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras), better known by his stage name Carlos Mencia, is a comedian, writer, and actor in the United States. He is currently the host of his own show on Comedy Central, Mind of Mencia.

Biography

Early life

Ned Arnel Mencía was born the seventeenth of eighteen children. At the time of his birth, his mother, Magdelena Mencía from Mexico, was engaged in a domestic dispute with his father, Honduran Roberto Holness, and declined to give her son his biological father's last name. The name appearing on his birth certificate is "Ned Arnel Mencía", although Mencia has said that out of respect for his biological father he went by the Holness name anyway, and was known as "Ned Holness" until he was eighteen years old.

Mencia was raised in East Los Angeles, California by his aunt Consuelo and uncle Pablo Mencia. By his own admission, staying out of trouble was difficult while growing up, but with the help of his family he excelled in school and stayed out of gangs. He majored in electrical engineering at California State University, Los Angeles, but left early to pursue a career in comedy after a successful performance at an open mic night at The Laugh Factory. He also has an older brother named Joseph Mencia who often appears on Carlos' program Mind of Mencia.

Mencia currently lives with his wife, Amy, in the Los Angeles area in California.They have one child, Lucas Pablo Mencia.

Career

Mencia was a quick success at such venerated LA stand-up venues as The Comedy Store and The L.A. Cabaret. This led to appearances on The Arsenio Hall Show and Buscando Estrellas, where he attained the title “International Comedy Grand Champion.” Then, in 1994, Mencia was chosen to host HBO's latino comedy showcase Loco Slam.

Mencia followed up Loco Slam by hosting Funny is Funny! on Galavision in 1998. He would continue to do stand-up, including a very successful tour in 2001 with Freddy Soto and Pablo Francisco, “The Three Amigos.” Mencia also did two half-hour specials on HBO, the second of which won him a CableACE Award for Best Stand-Up Comedy Special. After the release of his first comedy album by Warner Records, Take A Joke America, Mencia performed his break-out performance on Comedy Central Presents in 2002.

By the time his career began to take off in the early 2000s, Mencia was also working as an actor doing guest appearances in the television shows Moesha and The Shield, and starring in the film Outta Time and the animated show The Proud Family.

At the end of 2004, Comedy Central began talks with Carlos Mencia for his own program shortly after their renewal of comedian Dave Chappelle's contract for Chappelle's Show. In March of 2005, prior to Chappelle’s April 28, 2005 departure from the production of Chappelle’s Show and subsequent trip to Africa, Comedy Central announced Mencia's own half-hour comedy show, Mind of Mencia. The show mixed Mencia's stand up comedy with sketch comedy, the same basis for the highly popular Chappelle's Show. The show achieved moderate success in its first season and was brought back for a second season in the spring of 2006, becoming Comedy Central’s second highest rated program behind South Park, and again for a third season that summer.

Maxim magazine recently named Mencia as the 12th-worst comedian of all time, although television viewers themselves had voted him into 2nd place of the Top 25 stand-up comics in Comedy Central's 2006 "Stand Up Showdown".

Comedy

File:Carlos Mencia Not fot the Easily Offended.jpg

The cover for the DVD Carlos Mencia: Not for the Easily Offended.

Like many comedians, he focuses on race, sexual orientation, politics, religion, class and society, but in a style which intentionally violates rules of what is politically correct by, for example, making a point to use racial epithets or terms such as “retarded” rather than “disabled” or “mentally handicapped” and otherwise going out of his way to offend liberal sensibilities, such as by advocating capital punishment and sustaining a generally high level of raunchiness in his material. A staple of his material is diatribes denouncing the actions of people he considers to be stupid, often using his trademark “DEE-Dee-dee!” He has stated that the phrase does not refer to people “who were born retarded,” but rather people “who were born, and are now retarded.” As said in his "Dee-Dee-Dee" song, "Dee-Dee-Dee doesn't mean mentally retarded, it means stupid. And all of you stupid people out there are going to find this song hilarious but you don't even know, its about you." He often advocates Social Darwinism's “survival of the fittest” type solutions to this perceived problem of too much stupidity. He is particularly masterful at using hyped comedic set-up. With this style Mencia is able to tell a fairly benign joke, and while the audience laughs he creates an illusion that he must hold back their laughter by raising an open-faced hand and yelling "wait" or "hold on", leaving the air open for the continuation.

Some consider his jokes to be intentionally provocative and racist, focusing on stereotypes for the sake of publicity or easy laughs (an example is his use of the word "beaner" to refer to Mexicans). Mencia, however, says he does not focus on any one race, but that he creates comedy about all races, ethnicities and religions equally, without the desire to have his words taken too seriously. He has the opinion that life should be filled with comedy, as shown by his catchphrase "If you ain't laughin', you ain't livin.'" During the war in Iraq, he was frequently seen advocating free speech. He was quoted as saying "Somewhere right now, there is a soldier dying to protect our rights. One of these rights is free speech. And I will never let a soldier die in vain."

Accusations of plagiarism

Comedian Joe Rogan wrote a post on his website publicly accusing Mencia of being a plagiarist, alleging that Mencia stole jokes from a number of comedians.

Mencia responded to the accusations while being interviewed on the Tucson, Arizona The Frank Show, stating that Joe Rogan had fabricated the plagiarism charge out of jealousy. On his own website, Mencia argued that the material in question was too generic to be attributed to any single comedian.

On February 10, 2007 Rogan confronted Mencia on stage at the Comedy Store on Sunset and continued his allegations of plagiarism. A video of the altercation was posted on his website. In the video, Joe Rogan's arguments were backed by different audio and video clips from other comedians including George Lopez. The Comedy Store later canceled Joe Rogan's upcoming shows at that particular venue.

George Lopez has accused Mencia of plagiarizing his material. In an interview on The Howard Stern Show, Lopez accused Mencia of plagiarizing 13 minutes of his material in Mencia's HBO special. He also claimed he had a physical altercation with Mencia over the alleged plagiarism.

The only joke that George Lopez has publicly specified was stolen and used on Mencia's HBO special was a Taco Bell joke. Comedian Ted Sarnowski countered this claim, stating that the Taco Bell joke he performed on radio in 1988 was later taken and used without permission by Lopez, the radio station's resident comic. Sarnowski claims to have given Mencia permission to use the joke, yet Lopez later began referring to Mencia as a "thief" over the joke Lopez allegedly plagiarized.

In 2007, a video appeared on the internet, which opens with an accusation that Carlos Mencia plagiarized a joke from Bill Cosby's 1983 performance, Fatherhood. Two clips follow: one of Cosby in 1983 delivering a joke and one of Mencia in 2005 delivering a very similar joke. This sparked widespread accusations of plagiarism on Mencia's part.

Other work

Mencia is a frequent guest on the Opie and Anthony radio show on XM Satellite Radio and CBS Radio. He took part in in first Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour in 2006.

Mencia starred in a Super Bowl XLI commercial for Bud Light which was the #1 most replayed commercial according to TiVo. Mind of Mencia's production company is Nedlos, a portmanteau of Mencia's birth name and stage name.

Filmography

• In Living Color (TV), playing a Valet in episode six of season two, October 28 1990
• Moesha (TV), playing Carlos in the episode “Life Imitating Art,” February 9 1999
• The Proud Family (TV), starring as Felix (voice) (2001-2005)
• The Shield (TV) playing Gabo in the episode “Two Days of Blood,” May 28 2002
• Outta Time (2002), playing “Juancho”
• 29 Palms (2002), playing “The Comedian”
• Mind of Mencia (TV) Host (2005-Present)
• Drawn Together (TV) playing the King of Mexico (voice) in the episode “Mexican't Buy Me Love”, November 8 2006
• Farce of the Penguins (2007)
• The Heartbreak Kid (2007), playing Uncle Tito

Not including his comedy specials for HBO and Comedy Central, Mencia has also appeared on Comic Relief, and hosted Loco Slam in 1994, Latino Laugh Festival in 1997, Funny is Funny! in 1998, and Uncensored Comedy: That's Not Funny in 2003.

Discography

• Take a Joke America (2001)
• America Rules (2002)
• Unmerciful (2003)
• Not for the Easily Offended (2003)
• Down to the Nitty Gritty (2004)
• This is Carlos Mencia (2006)
• Mind of Mencia Season 1 (2006)
• No Strings Attached (2006)
• Mind of Mencia Season 2 (2007)

External links

• Official Website
• Carlos Mencia at IMDb
• Template:Nndb name
• Mind Of Mencia at ComedyCentral.com
• Carlos Mencia on MySpace
• Video suggesting Mencia plagerized Cosby