A well-known comic going through the load of Los Angeles prosecutors has a previous that’s no laughing matter.
Carlos Mencia of “Thoughts of Mencia” fame has a troubled historical past, together with inside his profession as a jokester.
Fellow comedians like George Lopez, Ari Shaffir, and Bobby Lee accused him of pilfering jokes from them over the course of his profession.
The scandal reached a fever pitch when Joe Rogan hopped on stage in the course of Mencia’s set on the Comedy Retailer in February 2007 to accuse him of being a joke thief.
“If somebody steals a riff from a music, that sh*t’s within the information always,” he mentioned. “Motherf***er steals sh*t and makes it on HBO. They steal sh*t, they usually put it on tv.”
One joke Mencia was accused of stealing was a Shaffir bit the place he joked about how then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger needed to construct a wall between California and Mexico. Shaffir requested the governor who he thinks goes to construct the wall.
Mencia had a really comparable joke, with the identical punchline, asking who was going to construct the wall.
He’s maintained that he’s executed nothing flawed.
South Park even parodied the scandal, displaying Mencia take credit score for a joke that wasn’t his on a fictional Conan O’Brien tv spot.
Mencia additionally confronted monetary points in recent times.
The Inner Income Service put liens on a number of properties Mencia owned in Douglas County in Oregon for a number of years of unpaid federal earnings taxes totaling about $1.2 million.
One of many properties was a 7,189 square-foot house with eight bedrooms and 7 baths valued at $1.5 million.
Mencia bought a house in Encino, California, in 2008 for near its asking worth of $4.4 million. The property, a walled and gated Mediterranean-style house, has six bedrooms and eight loos throughout 8,500 sq. toes. He even had a storage giant sufficient to suit six automobiles.
The comic admitted to committing devious crimes in his teen years. In a 2006 NPR interview, he mentioned he was a drug supplier when he was 19 and robbed somebody’s home after they didn’t pay him the cash they owed.
“Any individual owed me cash, so that is how silly I used to be. I known as him up, and I mentioned, ‘I’m coming to your home. Should you don’t have my cash you higher not be there.’ And once I acquired there the individual wasn’t there,” he mentioned.
“I broke into their home, took video gear, every kind of stuff, in order that I might promote it to make my a reimbursement. And on the best way house I spotted, what did I simply break into anyone’s home? My God! What’s flawed with me?”
Los Angeles DA Nathan Hochman is ready to disclose legal fees towards Mencia in a Thursday press convention.
The California Submit reached out to reps for Rogan, Shaffir, Lopez and Lee for remark.
