Really, no offense taken

"I'm gonna make fun of everybody," host-comedian Carlos Mencia said in the very first episode of "Mind of Mencia," which Comedy Central trucked out a few weeks ago as if to seem a little more Chappelle-ish after the disappearance of Dave Chappelle. A little later on, after a bunch of jokes about Mexicans and Muslims, he said, "I don't care, I'll make fun of anybody," and later still, in a variation on the theme, he said: "A lot of you people are going to be offended by something I say tonight. If we didn't get to you, don't worry. There's a lot of show left."

Several episodes into "Mind of Mencia," I'm not so much offended by Mencia's offensiveness as annoyed by his insistence that he is offending me. The ethnic comedian throwing around slurs at his own and other ethnicities has the ability to shock, but that doesn't make it the shock of the new. Mencia's wetback illegal, his Muslim towel-head, his gay with the funny voice -- they might reliably titillate an Improv audience on a Saturday night or even a Latino-themed theater tour, but on TV Mencia is just peddling the easiest kind of shock value, as if we might be fooled into thinking it's still the politically correct early '90s out there. He insistently conjures the stereotypes without any particular spin, then cuts to an unearned, quick: Can you handle his truth?

It is, paradoxically, a form of pleading with the audience to like you. Don Rickles, all these years, can apologize to the Puerto Rican people just after -- and before -- making another joke about them, but his whole act is a wink, not a statement. And Rickles is a storyteller. So is Chappelle, who on his TV show and in his club act gets at the weird, tense fabric of his ethnicity. He burrows where Mencia skates.

I remember seeing Mencia at the Comedy Store a few years ago, and what I recall is one of those voluble alpha males doing jokes about Mexican gardeners driving the freeways. That it was coming from an L.A.-bred Latino (Mencia, according to published reports, is actually half-Honduran and half-German) gave the show that extra little edge.

To be good at this can get you somewhere, and Mencia has clearly figured out the cadence and the presentation of the comic, if not the need for the material to be surprising.

He does translate to TV (why hasn't this guy gotten a sitcom?). There's some kind of unformed gift there. But "Mind of Mencia" is a rainbow coalition of surface jokes. Sept. 11, Mencia said on that first episode, was a great day for blacks and Latinos enduring racist heat because "America is a giant game of tag. And guess what, Ahmed, you're it."