By Jae-Ha Kim
Amazon.com
April 6, 2007
With the second season of Mind of Mencia, comedian Carlos Mencia doesn’t hold back, whether he’s skewering George W. Bush, gays, or racial stereotypes (including his beloved “beaners”).
Mencia displays an almost child-like glee during his monologues that are a part of each episode. Flapping his arms and legs around like a kid who’s heard the funniest joke, he punctuates stories with his trademark sing-song “dee de dee.”
The second season, which aired in 2006 on Comedy Central, starts off with a hilarious send up of Brokeback Mountain. Mencia’s version is Wetback Mountain, starring himself and former Saved By the Bell actor Mario Lopez. The skit’s reveal isn’t that the characters are gay (they’re not). Rather, it’s that they secretly revel in burritos, piñatas, and ponchos when Caucasians aren’t around to watch them being… Mexican.
Mencia is a good actor when he puts his mind to it. In one skit where he portrays an ethnic convenience store employee, he delivers zingers not unlike Johnny Carson doing his “Amazing Kreskin” bits. To a smoker who is having lung problems, he chides, “You need cigarettes like this country needs another C-average president.” And to a particularly hefty customer complaining that she’d be thin, too, if she had a celebrity’s entourage to whip her into shape, he predicts, “If you had a personal trainer, you would probably eat him.”
This season is filled with guest appearances by fellow comics Cheech Marin, Dave Attell, and a poker-faced Peter Boyle (Everybody Loves Raymond), who surmises that the “Jesus fish” on the back of Christians’ cars basically means, “I love Jesus, but I don’t know how to spell it.”
The highlights of the two-disc set, which includes all 14 episodes, are a spoof of Pirates of the Caribbean (with some scenery chomping turns by Jamie Kennedy, Tracy Morgan, and Bobby Lee), and a competition he dubs the Stereotype Olympics, in which he sets out to settle once and for all which ethnic groups are the fastest, best suited for looting, and the most, um, well-endowed. The results are surprisingly hilarious.
