I absolutely love stand-up comedy. I love to hear the raw thoughts of the stand-up on stage, as they are appealing to an audience of their peers different life experiences they have had, or things they have thought up or seen that they just thought were so ****ing stupid that they had to share it with someone.
There used to be stand-ups who took on a persona that everyone could relate to (Rodney Dangerfield comes to mind) or were just so damn crazy that you couldn't help but laugh with them as they laughed at others (Richard Pryor). And then, there were the thought-provoking comics like George Carlin, who, despite pretending to be a loon, was the smartest guy in the room, who appealed to people to rethink things they saw when they walked around, and realize just how screwed up things were, and how easily they could change things.
Now, this might seem to not have anything to do with "Mind Of Mencia," which, as I agree with most commentators here, is Comedy Central's horrid solution to the loss of "Chappelle's Show," but it does. Carlos Mencia spends half of the show doing stand-up bits for his audience, sometimes on popular topics, most of the time on just racism and racial stereotypes. He tries to be all three of the above types of stand-ups. He makes a stage character, an every-day Mexican named Carlos who, despite stereotypes, is just your run-of-the-mill normal guy. He then proceeds to try to laugh at others, people he calls racist or just those that disagree with his opinion. And then, finally, he presents skits to the studio audience and the viewer, telling them that it will help them see his point of view.
Carlos Mencia always says he's showing a point of view that people don't see, yet what he is really doing is not only promoting racist stereotypes that already exist and have been joked about to death, but he stupidly encourages people to hear them and do the one thing that helps keep them around:laugh.
Promoting stereotypes is usually the lowest, yet easiest, way to get laughs in stand-up. The best comedians, which, I fear, Carlos Mencia feels he is in good company with, don't have to resort to them. They talk universally, and ask you to laugh AT absurdity, rather than with it, like Mencia encourages. As he creates more skits or "real-life" situations that call for racism or the bashing of others with the use of it, he tells us, rather than asks us, to laugh, and actually presents these absurdities as truth, rather than just extremes of it.
His show is an insult to the minds of those who watch it. Mencia doesn't give us comedy and ask us to digest it and take from it what we want (something that, as much as I hate to compare the two, was "Chappelle's Show's" finest quality) he tells us exactly how we should view it and react to it---which, according to him, is to make a stupid face and say "Dee Dee Dee!" This show is appropriately named. It is indeed a show about "The Mind of Mencia." It's Mencia's mind, through and through, and, as such, is nothing more than dumb entertainment. The show is tailor-made to give life lessons to its core audience, 14-24 year olds, about how stereotypes are bad, but that racial bashing is alright to Carlos Mencia, and therefore should be alright to you!
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