Photo by Howard Benites
Audio By Carbonatix
If you’ve spent any time doomscrolling Instagram lately, chances are you’ve stumbled across a familiar Miami archetype: a guy explaining how to drink water “the Miami way,” or serenading a glass-box house like it’s a cursed monument to gentrification. The accent’s right, the posture’s perfect, the vibe impeccable.
That’s Sergio Mendez, a born-and-raised Miami Beach kid whose hyper-specific Miami sketches have quietly turned him into one of the city’s most recognizable comedy voices online, and one of its most dependable presences onstage.
Mendez grew up in a tight orbit around Miami Beach, attending North Beach Elementary, Nautilus, and Miami Beach Senior High; all within about a mile and a half of one another. “I’m a Beach boy,” he says plainly. “Born and raised. I went to every public school you could go to on the Beach. I grew up always in the same neighborhood.”
Comedy didn’t arrive as a clear-cut calling out of the gate. It crept in sideways, through skateboarding, a sixth-grade Jackass obsession, and a homemade knockoff video series called Nutsack. “Everyone had a version of that,” Mendez laughs. “But when we were doing it, we thought we were so original.”
Stand-up came later, in 2019 to be exact, after a breakup and a creeping sense that adulthood was passing him by. “All my friends had kids, long-term relationships,” he says. “I had none of that shit. I was like, ‘Dude, you gotta do something with your life.’”
So he did what many Miami comics of a certain era did: He went to Churchill’s. The Little Haiti institution became his unofficial training ground, especially the Monday-night all-arts open mic. “That was my spot,” Mendez says. “I loved Churchill’s.” The all-arts rooms were a more forgiving, strange, and less brutal landscape than straight stand-up gigs, and they gave him room to experiment before diving headfirst into Miami’s notoriously ruthless bar-show circuit.
From there, he floated through Las Rosas, Taurus, Red Bar, Sweet Caroline, and any room that would have him, absorbing the unspoken rules of the medium along the way. “Most of comedy is hanging out,” he says. “That’s what people don’t know. Being a good vibe goes a long way. Always bring a joint, too.”
The Miami Way
All that hanging translated to confidence onstage, and eventually, to crowd work. Today, Mendez has a knack for that particular aspect of the craft, but it didn’t come naturally. “In the beginning, I was terrified of interacting with the audience,” he admits. “But I saw how crowd work could turn a room. It’s a tool.”
Miami bar crowds, he explains, demand it. These aren’t seated, ticketed comedy club audiences. They’re people who wandered in mid-drink and now have to be convinced not to hate you for disrupting their evening. “You have to earn their attention, then their respect, then their laughter,” he says. “If you get all three, then you’ve got the room rocking.”
During the pandemic, when stages disappeared, Mendez leaned harder into posting online, not strategically, but as a means to feed his creative urges.
“I’ve been posting dumb content for a long time,” he says. “Stream-of-consciousness stuff — just slowly diving into madness from being inside too long.” Then, earlier this year, something clicked. A sketch titled “How to Drink Water in Miami” blew up, followed by a musical ode to Miami’s glass-box architectural takeover. Suddenly, the same type of guys who once bullied him were in his DMs. “They’re like, ‘Yeah dude, I love that shit,’” he laughs. “That’s amazing.”
A Sold-Out Stand-Up Special
Unlike many creators, Mendez isn’t glued to analytics or growth hacks. “Not really, bro,” he says when asked about strategy. “It’s just constantly doing it. Being a slave to the algorithm, but lovingly.”
That looseness mirrors his place in the Miami comedy scene itself: present, prolific, and deeply local. He’s run his own rooms, hosted countless shows, and logged the kind of stage time that doesn’t always go viral, but builds a sturdier foundation underneath.
That fluency onstage culminated last fall, when Mendez recorded his first stand-up special during a sold-out show at the now-shuttered Shirley’s at Gramps. Released on YouTube, the October set captures a comedian comfortable in his own skin, working material shaped by years of gigging in traditional and alternative spaces around town.
Online, his sketches feel like inside jokes that everyone is in on. For Mendez, it’s not about escaping the city’s madness, as many comedians before him have done. It’s about translating it, one bar crowd, one glass-box, and one “so Miami” bit at a time.
