Carlos Mencia

Ned Arnel Mencia (born October 22, 1967) known professionally as Carlos Mencía, is a Honduran-American comedian, writer, and actor. His style of comedy is often political and involves issues of race relations, Latin American culture, criminal justice, and social class. From 2005 to 2008, he hosted the Comedy Central show Mind of Mencia. Around the time of the show's cancellation, several comedians accused Mencía of plagiarism and stealing jokes.

Ned Arnel Holness was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras on October 22, 1967, to Honduran parents Magdelena Mencia and Roberto Holness. He has 16 older siblings and one younger sibling. At the time of his birth, his mother was engaged in a domestic dispute with his father, and she subsequently refused to give Mencía his biological father's surname. Out of respect for his father, he later began using the Holness surname anyway, and did so until the age of 18. He moved to the U.S. as a child and was raised Catholic in East Los Angeles by his aunt Consuelo and uncle Pablo Mencía. By his own admission, staying out of trouble was difficult while growing up, but his family helped him excel in school and stay out of gangs. He dealt drugs and robbed a house when he was 19 years old. He attended Garfield High School in Los Angeles County, and later majored in electrical engineering at California State University, Los Angeles; however, he dropped out to pursue a career in comedy after a successful performance at an open mic night at The Laugh Factory. In 1988, at the suggestion of the Comedy Store owner Mitzi Shore, he began using the first name "Carlos" to appeal to Mexican audiences.

Mencia performed at venerated LA stand-up venues such as The Comedy Store and The L.A. Cabaret. His success in these venues led to appearances on The Arsenio Hall Show and Buscando Estrellas, where he attained the title "International Comedy Grand Champion." Then, in 1994, Mencia was chosen to host HBO's latino comedy showcase Loco Slam.

Mencia followed up Loco Slam by hosting Funny is Funny! on Galavision in 1998. He would continue to do stand-up, including a successful tour in 2001 with Freddy Soto and Pablo Francisco, "The Three Amigos." Mencia also did two half-hour specials on HBO, the second of which won him a CableACE Award for Best Stand-Up Comedy Special. After the release of his first comedy album by Warner Records, Take A Joke America, Mencia performed his break-out performance on Comedy Central Presents in 2002.

By the time his career began to take off in the early 2000s, Mencia was also working as an actor doing guest appearances in the television shows Moesha and The Shield, and starring in the film Outta Time and the animated show The Proud Family.

In 2002, he performed on Comedy Central Presents. In March 2005, Comedy Central announced Mencia's own half-hour comedy show, Mind of Mencia The show mixed Mencia's stand up comedy with sketch comedy, much like Dave Chappelle's Chappelle's Show. The show achieved moderate success in its first season and was brought back for a second season in the spring of 2006, becoming Comedy Central's second highest-rated program behind South Park. The success of the series prompted Mencia to go a highly publicized arena tour titled "The Punisher Tour" in 2006 The show's third season premiered in early 2007. The series ended in 2008 after four seasons when Mencia decided against filming a fifth season, explaining "It would have felt repetitive and redundant. There's a lot of different doors that are opening for me...I truly have no idea what's next."

Mencia was sometimes a guest on the Opie and Anthony radio show on XM Satellite Radio and CBS Radio. He took part in the first Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour in 2006.

Mencia married his wife, Amy, in 2003. They reside in Los Angeles and have a son.

In a 2025 interview with DJ Vlad Mencia revealed that he was sexually abused as a child.

Mencia is parodied in "Fishsticks", an April 2009 episode of the animated TV Series South Park, that aired as part of its thirteenth season. In the episode, Mencia takes credit for the "fishsticks" joke that fourth grader Jimmy Valmer actually conceives of and popularizes. When hip hop artist Kanye West is publicly mocked over his inability to understand the joke's punchline, he kidnaps and beats Mencia, who admits that he took credit for the joke because he isn't funny, explaining, "I just take jokes and repackage them with a Mexican accent, man!" Kanye later kills Mencia after he attempts to explain the punchline to him.

In 2023, Mencia was the subject of an episode of the Vice TV documentary series Dark Side of Comedy.