I’d contrast Mencia with the Aristocrats. 

You know the joke: Group goes into an agent’s office. What’s the act? Insert every disgusting thing you can think of. What on earth do you call it? The Aristocrats.

On one hand, the joke is the contrast between all the shocking low stuff and the name of the act. But the real joke is how the teller goes through the process of telling it. Sarah Silverman, for example, tells it in the first person, slowly realizing through the telling that her entire childhood is a history of sexual abuse. Which she somehow makes funny in ways I cannot explain. 

I could use the same words that Sarah uses, but because of my delivery and because I’m a large male instead of a small female, the joke is different. Don’t want to be sexist or anything, but that just is, just as “Change The Locks” is entirely different when done by Tom Petty and Lucinda Williams, even with very similar arrangements. Personality and presentation and performance. The problem with Carlos Mencia is that there wasn’t much if any of Carlos in those jokes.

Beginners are taught to learn the work of the masters, be it painters in the museum painting copies of Rembrandt or a musician tabbing out Eruption. But the point is that you try to mix and match and expand to make it you. People like cover bands, just like people like dogs playing poker on black velvet, but if that’s all you do, you are looked down upon by other musicians, or at least not looked at with the same light as people who are more clearly original. Think of all the post-SRV blues guitarists who were derided as “Strat-and-a-Hat’ players because there wasn’t anything to them that wasn’t done better on Texas Flood and Couldn’t Stand The Weather.

I’ll check out the podcast – sounds like fun.