A famous comedian facing the weight of Los Angeles prosecutors has a past that is no laughing matter.
Carlos Mencia of “Mind of Mencia” fame has a troubled history, including within his career 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 career.
The scandal reached a fever pitch when Joe Rogan hopped on stage in the middle of Mencia’s set at the Comedy Store in February 2007 to accuse him of being a joke thief.
“If someone steals a riff from a song, that sh*t’s in the news constantly,” he said. “Motherf***er steals sh*t and makes it on HBO. They steal sh*t, and they put it on television.”
One joke Mencia was accused of stealing was a Shaffir bit where he joked about how then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to build a wall between California and Mexico. Shaffir asked the governor who he thinks is going to build the wall.
Mencia had a very similar joke, with the same punchline, asking who was going to build the wall.
He’s maintained that he’s done nothing wrong.
South Park even parodied the scandal, showing Mencia take credit for a joke that wasn’t his on a fictional Conan O’Brien television spot.
Mencia also faced financial issues in recent years.
The Internal Revenue Service put liens on several properties Mencia owned in Douglas County in Oregon for several years of unpaid federal income taxes totaling about $1.2 million.
One of the properties was a 7,189 square-foot home with eight bedrooms and seven baths valued at $1.5 million.
Mencia purchased a home in Encino, California, in 2008 for close to its asking price of $4.4 million. The property, a walled and gated Mediterranean-style home, has six bedrooms and eight bathrooms across 8,500 square feet. He even had a garage large enough to fit six cars.
The comedian admitted to committing devious crimes in his teen years. In a 2006 NPR interview, he said he was a drug dealer when he was 19 and robbed someone’s house after they didn’t pay him the money they owed.
“Somebody owed me money, so this is how stupid I was. I called him up, and I said, ‘I’m coming to your house. If you don’t have my money you better not be there.’ And when I got there the person wasn’t there,” he said.
“I broke into their house, took video equipment, all kinds of stuff, so that I could sell it to make my money back. And on the way home I realized, what did I just break into somebody’s house? My God! What is wrong with me?”
Los Angeles DA Nathan Hochman is set to reveal criminal charges against Mencia in a Thursday press conference.
The California Post reached out to reps for Rogan, Shaffir, Lopez and Lee for comment.