Comedian Carlos Mencia, who hasn’t been seen much since his 2008 series ‘Mind of Mencia’ went off the air, returns Tuesday night with a fresh stand-up special on Comedy Central, ‘Carlos Mencia: New Territory.’

The big question is how exactly he’ll define “new.”

The comedian took some time off to regroup, and even lost 70 pounds in the process — something he knew he had to do when a diabetic friend warned him he was too overweight.

The comic has rather infamously weathered numerous accusations that he’s stolen jokes from other comedians like George Lopez and Bill Cosby, with several highly-viewed YouTube videos doing side-by-side comparisons to prove the thievery.

A 2010 interview on the podcast ‘WTF with Marc Maron’ in which Maron addressed Mencia’s alleged joke thievery proved disastrous for Mencia, who later said “I was defeated” and that the controversy had gotten to a point where it was “so untrue, it’s so far gone, I’m done.”

Regardless of the turmoil of the past several years, Mencia now seems circumspect about it all, saying, “I have an opportunity to do something really amazing … to have gone from nothing to ‘Mind of Mencia’ to having all of this controversy to now being able to do it again. I get the opportunity to become Carlos Mencia all over again. It’s a great place to be.”

Take a look at a preview of ‘Carlos Mencia: New Territory’ below.

 

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