Carlos Mencia and our SAT Practice...

We wrote our practice SAT essay today in class, and it dealt about if people put too much emphasis on practical skills in our lives. I, of course, agreed with the quote/statement, because it is obvious that our environments our fueled by the need to simply get through the day in the most efficient way possible. But another big idea present in statement, however, was one of how we are influenced by our surroundings. Both of these ideas connect to popular stand-up comic and Mind of Mencia host, Carlos Mencia. Many of you know him as the 'provacative' comic who deals with racial issues.

I used to think that Carlos Mencia was funny. This was when his first stand up special was on Comedy Central. I remember laughing at his joke about a US tank full of black guys being basically a giant drive-by machine. This lead to slight disappointment when I realized his jokes were starting to get recycled. Hah-hah, beaners jump fences, h-ok. White people are chraaaayzheeee. Got it.

I have officially lost all respect for Carlos Mencia.

Those of you who don't know him won't care. Those of you who know him probably still won't care. But those of you who love him will be perplexed.

The reason I have lost all respect for him is not only because I realized his jokes were basically all the same, but also because he did the one thing that really, truly offended me:

He insulted the death of Steve Irwin.

Now, Carlos' signature style is where he makes fun of people doing stupid things. But when I was listening to him tell this "joke" about Steve Irwin getting killed, I was mostly just getting pissed off. Why? Well, for one, Mencia made it sound like Steve Irwin was playing frisbee with the damn stingray. He went on to mock what Steve Irwin had done on his TV shows, implicating that all he did was go around playing with dangerous animals, saying "Now I'm gonna go touch it's balls".

How does this relate to the SAT?

I was walking away from english when it came to me that Carlos Mencia is influenced solely by practicality.

He doesn't have the sophistication of a comic like Christopher Titus or the true edginess of someone like Richard Pryor. Instead, he takes the most superficial information from sources with a lot of depth and uses shock value to get laughs. For instance, he had a segment where he made fun of what he believe to be retarded headlines. An example? "Ethanol gas, produced from corn, goes up in production".

What was his mastermind joke?

"When I eat corn, I make gas too, ahahahah."

Fantastic.

The worst part of it all, though, was the audience. I was just blown away by the fact that someone didn't stand up and say "Dude...you're sort of wrong". Really? Steve Irwin died from literally playing with a sting ray? Really? He DESERVED to die? He literally said that! "The Croc Hunter deserved to die!"

So what was wrong? Was the audience brain-dead? Is the average group of Americans really as ignorant as some foreigners say? Maybe it was just a bad batch, but I was just reeling from this. I guess it was mob-mentality? How are we this influenced by our environment? Maybe the crowd really did enjoy Mencia screaming "He deserved to die" about a man passionate about helping animals. But I doubt it. In every audience member there HAD to be a little bell going "ding-a-freaking-ling, that was inappropriate...right?".

Carlos knows that he can get laughs. And I really do think he manipulates whatever he can to get those laughs. But honestly, is being this pragmatic about humor necessary?

This blog post is probably just showing how two things, practicality and influence, connected in our essay question, can be negatively seen in real life.

Or maybe I'm just pissed off at Carlos, I don't know.