Ned? Really? Carlos Mencia’s real name is Ned?

“Yeah, that’s my birth name,” the 43-year-old Honduran-born comedian said the next day.

“My birth name is Ned Arnel Mencia, because when we were coming to America, my mother gave me a name she thought would fit in here,” he says. “She didn’t realize that we were moving to East L.A., which is pretty much little Mexico. So my name got me beat up in school pretty much every year.”

Teachers would take roll call, he says, shouting out names like Roberto, Manuel, Julio, Alberto, Hugo, then scan the room calling out, “Ned?” Mencia says she was “looking around for some white kid.”

Fast forward to Mencia’s first year in the comedy business, May 1988, talking with Mitzi Shore (actor Pauly Shore’s mom), owner of the legendary Los Angeles club The Comedy Store.

Switching his voice to a nasal, crass style, Mencia relates the conversation.

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