Mind of Mencia Uncensored: Season 1 (review)

There’s not much to Carlos Mencia’s mind, as it turns out, beyond the typical brand of moronic racist, sexist, anti-gay crap we’re all unfortunately already familiar with. Through the course of these 12 episodes -- the entire first season of the Comedy Central series -- of standup comedy, man-in-the-street interviews, and sketches that are outrageous only in their obviousness, no one escapes Mencia’s pointlessly meanspirited “wit.” But it’s “okay” because all races, nationalities, genders, and sexual orientations come under fire, because he is “striking a blow” against political correctness, and because it’s “honest.” This is what we’ve come to in America: bigotry must be tolerated if the bigot is honest about it -- though clearly Mencia does feel the need to make excuses for himself: he actually proffers the “lots of my friends are homos” justification for picking on gays. It does rather limit one of the excuses we could make for him, that it’s all an act to rile up an audience that he acknowledges is dumb as a post, which is probably how he gets away with trotting out the same “jokes” from one episode to the next: no one notices. One thing he can’t get enough of: popping a red-checked dishtowel on his head and spouting pretend Arabic as he rants about how it’s now the “terrorists” turn to be hated by white America. It’s all the fun of Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech with none of the responsibility. Extras include multilingual intolerance: Mencia supplies commentary tracks on selected episodes in Spanish.