"HOW come you don't make fun of Albanians?"
That's the kind of complaint that typically turns up in comedian Carlos Mencia's e-mail, a peculiar but somehow satisfying echo of the aggressive, everybody's-fair-game, cut-through-the-bull comedic commentary that he's been spouting in his stand-up shows and TV appearances for almost 20 years, most recently on his popular half-hour Comedy Central showcase, "Mind of Mencia."
The more ethnic stereotypes and hypocritical behavior that he drags out into the spotlight and mercilessly mocks in his brazen bits, the more groups of people want to be included in the beating.
"I just like obliterating what people think is right and wrong," the 38-year-old comic said recently as he sat in a booth at Johnny Rockets in Encino sipping an iced tea on a stifling Valley-hot morning. "Because of how I manifest my thoughts on stage, people feel singled out when I don't talk about them."
"Mind of Mencia," now midway through its second season (new episodes returned Sunday), is Mencia's highest-profile forum yet for stomping through the delicate garden of political correctness. An amalgam of stand-up, audience interaction, sketches, parodies and man-on-the-street interviews, the show allows him to both impersonate and lampoon the cultural tics of Anglos, blacks, Latinos, Middle Easterners, Indians, gays, women, sheiks, rappers, dictators and pimps.
"Mind of Mencia" has taken over from the similarly structured "Chappelle's Show" (which it was originally intended to follow, before Chappelle's bail-out last year) as the second-highest rated program on Comedy Central next to "South Park." The show's audience has grown from an average of 1.4 million in its first season to 2.1 million this year. Mencia has begun fielding movie proposals, and in the fall he will launch a Comedy Central-sponsored 50-city stand-up tour, playing 5,000-seat venues. And the cable channel has just signed him for a third season of "Mind of Mencia," to begin shooting early next year.
"There was certainly a sigh of relief when the show did well, but we had high expectations for it in the beginning," said Lauren Corrao, Comedy Central's executive vice president of original programming and development. "If we hadn't, we would never have planned to schedule it behind 'Chappelle's Show' to begin with. Carlos is a star on the rise."
