Carlos Mencia's comedy pulls no punches
Carlos Mencia isn't just one of America's biggest Latino comedians. He's one of America's biggest comedians, period.
The third season of his Comedy Central series, "Mind of Mencia," recently ended. Once perceived as the heir presumptive to Dave Chappelle's "Chappelle's Show," the Honduran-born Mencia's racially charged mix of stand-up rants and sketches remains one of the cable networks' most popular shows, perhaps in spite of Mencia's controversial, heated approach.
The fourth season of "Mind" begins in the spring. In the meantime, fans can catch Mencia at theaters now, in a supporting role in "The Heartbreak Kid." His current stand-up tour stops for four shows in Joliet and Waukegan beginning Thursday.
Carlos Mencia, who recently celebrated his 40th birthday, called us recently. An edited transcript of that conversation follows.
Q. Do you prefer doing stand-up or sketch comedy?
A. They bring different levels of pleasure for me because obviously (I'm not bad) at them, and it's kind of fun to be able to exercise part of my brain, a different muscle in my creativity. But there's nothing as honest and as simple and as pure as stand-up. I don't know that I'll ever stop doing it. It's in my blood.
Even if I'm doing movies, I'll always do stand-up, and even if I get to the point where my movie career is so big that I can't tour, I'll still be doing stand-up at comedy clubs. The adrenaline rush of getting a huge laugh the day of or the day after something goes down and you're the first comedian to talk about it, that's just amazing. I love tackling issues that others are afraid to in a politically incorrect way, so I get that feeling a lot, and that's really fun.
Q. What makes you laugh?
A. Everything I talk about made me laugh before I talked about it. Something where I went, "That's retarded," or "That's stupid," but it was accompanied by a laugh. I'm pretty easy to make laugh.
Q. Would you say your humor is rooted in … I don't know if I'd say anger, but maybe frustration?
A. Oh yeah, definitely a large amount of it is frustration with the double standard or hypocrisy of something. That annoys me, or our inability to see things for how simple they are. At first, it gets me angry, then it makes me laugh, then I realize the level of frustration that occurred with it.
As an example, yeah, it's frustrating that Britney Spears doesn't know how dumb she is. She's rich, and rich can overcompensate for dumb. All she had to do was hire an au pair, hire someone where people go, "Oh my God, she's an au pair, she speaks three different languages." Then nobody's going to say you're a bad mom. That's it! That's all you had to do not to lose your kids. How dumb do you have to be not to know that, and why don't you know you're that dumb?
Q. Do you feel that people misinterpret your sense of humor?
A. Of course, all the time. But that's because they're stupid or they want to be offended. When you go see a movie and Jackie Chan beats the living (expletive) out of 10 people, nobody goes, "Man, Jackie Chan's mean, he's just kicking people's (expletive)." People understand that it's just a movie, they get that he didn't kill anybody.
With stand-up comedy, for some reason, it's different. People actually take some of this stuff to heart, or they don't understand that it's a performance, or that maybe we mean the opposite of what we're saying. Sometimes it's satire. Just the fact that we get heckled proves that they don't understand the art form.
Q. Because a lot of your humor touches on things that are, as you say, politically incorrect, do you go into it expecting that you'll get a rise out of people?
A. I don't look at it like that, I swear to God. Here's an example. I do an intricate joke where one of the basic punchlines is that African Americans are not good swimmers. And I inevitably get (growls), right? I only said that because it's a fact. You take every race per capita, black Americans have the least amount of swimmers per every hundred. What annoys me is when I say something like that, it's real and it's meant to depict what's going on, and people are like, "Why did you say that?"
In the end, if you don't want Carlos Mencia to make statements like that, then let's start putting more swimming pools in the ghetto. I can't tell you how many firefighter friends I have in certain places where so many of the African-American candidates fail out when it comes to the swimming test. When you're flying into places like Los Angeles, when you're going through middle-class neighborhoods there are a lot of swimming pools. As soon as you hit the ghetto, swimming pools are gone. When you live in the ghetto, and you have to go through two or three neighborhoods where you might get shot in order to go to the swimming pool, swimming doesn't become that big of a priority.
So, I don't want to defend my comedy the way I just described it to you, but in truth I never look at it as edgy. I look at it as, "Well, that's a fact!" It's like, whoa, why can't we make statements without people getting all freaked out?
Q. Do you get in trouble with the Latino community a lot?
A. I get in trouble with everybody a little bit. I don't get in trouble a lot because my comedy is responsible. If you pay attention to the nuances you'll find that I'm saying a lot of things, but on top of that I'm saying them in a positive way.
When I get through with that "black people can't swim" joke, if I have to go through that whole gamut of things and go, "Do you get it now?," and the audience is laughing, at the end they have some knowledge that, hey, there's something to this swimming thing, and maybe we need to fix this problem.
Q. When you were coming up as a comedian, did you feel that being a Latino either hurt or helped you?
A. I think it helped in some ways, I think it hurt in other ways. I can hypothesize that being a Latino helped me get deals. I can almost guarantee that, because every company has always wanted to say, "Hey, we're trying to do shows with Latinos." So, I was always in a holding deal with this company, that company.
On the other hand, Hollywood is one of those places that when something hits and becomes very successful, everybody follows. The fact that before the [George] Lopez show, there hadn't really been a hit Latino TV show since "Chico and the Man," that probably made it more difficult to actually get on the air. Now things are beginning to change. You've got a guy like Carlos Mencia who is doing unbelievably well, and it's not just Latinos who are watching. That's a big deal. That's saying that America embraces this type of comedy.
Q. You're not getting complacent.
A. No, I can't. In the end, I come from a working family, and I could be digging ditches. There but for the grace of God, you know what I'm saying? I can't slack off, because it's not like I'm one of a long line of Latino comedians that are kicking (expletive.)
The truth is that, not for me but for America out there, there's George Lopez, you might remember Paul Rodriguez -- you hopefully remember Paul Rodriguez -- and Carlos Mencia. That's not a lot, man. If I'm busy and George is busy, I don't know that they can get a cache name, so to speak. So we kind of have a responsibility. And when we do something, it resonates kind of loud in our communities. So we have to make sure we don't do things that [upset] our people too much.
Carlos Mencia
Where:
Rialto Square Theatre, 102 N. Chicago St., Joliet, and Genesee Theatre, 203 N. Genesee St., Waukegan
When:
7 and 10 p.m. Thursday (Rialto), 7 and 10:30 p.m. Nov. 16 (Genesee)
Tickets:
$43 (Rialto), $38-$48 (Genesee)
Phone:
(815) 726-6600 or www.rialtosquare.com (Rialto), (847) 782-2366 or www.geneseetheatre.com (Genesee)