Comedian Carlos Mencia was reportedly arrested in California on Thursday morning, on allegations of 12 felony counts of state tax evasion. Per Los Angeles’ KTLA, the former Mind Of Mencia host—who still works regularly as a touring club comedian, albeit at not quite the stadium-filling level he was operating at during his mid-2000s heyday—was arrested in his Encino home on allegations that he failed to pay California state taxes on $8.7 million in income from 2019 to 2024.
Among other things, the arrest of Mencia provided the opportunity for one of the great categories of cringe comedy in American public life, as L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman—who last appeared in the pages of The A.V. Club thanks to his aggressive efforts to keep the Menendez Brothers in jail after media projects spurred a new wave of interest in their case—attempted to be funny, or at least ironic, about Mencia’s arrest. “I am guessing that Mr. Mencia thought that taxes were maybe a laughing matter,” Hochman declared, deploying a joke setup that we presume he arrived at through parallel comedy evolution, and not by stealing the work of any number of other unfunny district attorneys who he’d seen express similar sentiments over the years. “But they’re not a laughing matter.”
It’s kind of hard to remember, in the modern era, how omnipresent Mencia was during his Comedy Central tenure, when he released multiple stand-up specials, appeared in Hollywood films, and felt just generally inescapable. It all came crashing down just a few years later, spurred on by accusations of joke thievery from a not-yet-ascendant Joe Rogan, tying into a general exhaustion with Mencia’s whole bit. He’s now facing 12 counts of tax evasion, six for his personal taxes, and another six for his professional ones, and could serve more than 10 years in prison if convicted. Mencia’s reportedly been dinged on tax issues before, with KTLA noting that the IRS had filed liens against properties he owned in Georgia in 2021.
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