Really, no offense taken

“I’m gonna make fun of everybody,” host-comedian Carlos Mencia said in the very first episode of “Mind of Mencia,” which Comedy Central trucked out a few weeks ago as if to seem a little more Chappelle-ish after the disappearance of Dave Chappelle. A little later on, after a bunch of jokes about Mexicans and Muslims, he said, “I don’t care, I’ll make fun of anybody,” and later still, in a variation on the theme, he said: “A lot of you people are going to be offended by something I say tonight. If we didn’t get to you, don’t worry. There’s a lot of show left.”

Several episodes into “Mind of Mencia,” I’m not so much offended by Mencia’s offensiveness as annoyed by his insistence that he is offending me. The ethnic comedian throwing around slurs at his own and other ethnicities has the ability to shock, but that doesn’t make it the shock of the new. Mencia’s wetback illegal, his Muslim towel-head, his gay with the funny voice -- they might reliably titillate an Improv audience on a Saturday night or even a Latino-themed theater tour, but on TV Mencia is just peddling the easiest kind of shock value, as if we might be fooled into thinking it’s still the politically correct early ‘90s out there. He insistently conjures the stereotypes without any particular spin, then cuts to an unearned, quick: Can you handle his truth?

It is, paradoxically, a form of pleading with the audience to like you. Don Rickles, all these years, can apologize to the Puerto Rican people just after -- and before -- making another joke about them, but his whole act is a wink, not a statement. And Rickles is a storyteller. So is Chappelle, who on his TV show and in his club act gets at the weird, tense fabric of his ethnicity. He burrows where Mencia skates.

I remember seeing Mencia at the Comedy Store a few years ago, and what I recall is one of those voluble alpha males doing jokes about Mexican gardeners driving the freeways. That it was coming from an L.A.-bred Latino (Mencia, according to published reports, is actually half-Honduran and half-German) gave the show that extra little edge.

To be good at this can get you somewhere, and Mencia has clearly figured out the cadence and the presentation of the comic, if not the need for the material to be surprising.

He does translate to TV (why hasn’t this guy gotten a sitcom?). There’s some kind of unformed gift there. But “Mind of Mencia” is a rainbow coalition of surface jokes. Sept. 11, Mencia said on that first episode, was a great day for blacks and Latinos enduring racist heat because “America is a giant game of tag. And guess what, Ahmed, you’re it.”

It’s sort of true, but is the history of racism against blacks, Latinos and Muslims really an apples to apples to apples comparison? Last week, after showing a photograph of Angelina Jolie, Mencia said: “How come so many Americans are adopting Asian babies. What is it? You adopt a Chinese kid and half an hour later you feel like adopting another one?”

OK, not only is this old material, Jolie’s first adopted child is from Cambodia (and he’s 3 years old) and her second is from Africa. This Wednesday, in a segment called “Out the Beaner,” Mencia shows a picture of Nicole Richie and hectors her for hiding her Mexican roots behind her adoptive father, pop star Lionel Richie.

That’s a little more coherent. But in the end, the show is another Comedy Central shout-out to the 18- to 19 1/2 -year-old pizza-for-breakfast eaters the network is forever chasing. Executive-produced by late-night veteran Robert Morton, David Letterman’s ex-guy, “Mind of Mencia” is a mix of stand-up and hit-or-miss taped bits (for instance, a half-baked take-off on the “Desperate Housewives” character John, a white teenage gardener who’s sleeping with his Latina employer, in which Mencia asks Mexican gardeners if they’ve ever slept with the lady of the house).

Still, for a comic it’s a shot, especially for someone who avoided and/or didn’t get a sitcom in which he likely would have played a Latino family man, his act cookie-cut into a series that would fit in between “My Wife and Kids” and “According to Jim.”

That kind of pyrrhic assimilation prize went most recently to George Lopez. In the prime-time ethnic food chain, if you want to look at it that way, Latino comics still trail African Americans in terms of exposure, which is in part a reflection of a long-standing absence of a Latino Bill Cosby or Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy (or now, Chris Rock). Who are the heroes? It hasn’t been Paul Rodriguez for some time. You’ll still hear John Leguizamo’s name mentioned, and Cheech and Chong, I hear, are reuniting. The networks in recent development seasons had been looking at Freddy Soto, a promising comic who died two weekends ago at age 35, after performing at the Laugh Factory.

In a way, the ghost is still Freddie Prinze, who rose from stand-up to TV star on “Chico and the Man,” only to commit suicide in 1977, at age 22. This fall, things come full circle, sort of, with ABC airing “Freddie,” starring Freddie Prinze Jr. as a Chicago bachelor who takes in his Puerto Rican mother, sister, sister-in-law and niece. But Prinze Jr. is a heartthrob, not a comic, and judging from the pilot it’s a sitcom in beige -- except for Prinze’s mother, who speaks in subtitled Spanish and places an “evil eater” icon over Prinze’s front door.

Mencia, better placed to push this envelope, is ultimately just yelling at it. Co-opting ethnic stereotypes and filtering your comedy through your own experience of white America is an honored comedic tradition to which he pays only passing homage. Then, too, his ethnic rage has a different reference point; unlike African Americans, Latinos don’t have the sorry American history of slavery and segregation, followed by a civil rights struggle, as a backdrop. The Latino story is its own struggle with its own icons, and there’s still a microphone waiting for a comic to spin the experience into gold.

Of course, the dearth of fresh comedic voices on TV is hardly a Latino problem. This month and next, Comedy Central will roll out two more males, D.L. Hughley and Adam Carolla, in late-night talk-show-esque series.

Carolla is ex of “The Man Show,” one in the canon of Comedy Central shows willfully committed to crude. “It’s a joyous reunion,” Carolla joked in the Comedy Central press release, “like a battered wife moving back in with her alcoholic husband.”

Be offended. Be very very offended.