Desus and Mero Have Conquered Comedy

The duo on transforming TV, dealing with cops, and how to be funny without being a jerk.
A photo collage of Desus Nice and The Kid Mero with a bodega subway train and a camera.
Illustration by Natasha Cunningham; Source photograph by Brian Ach / Invision / AP / Shutterstock

If there were a Guinness World Record for comic abundance, it would probably be held by Daniel Baker and Joel Martinez, the beloved Bronx comedy duo known as Desus and Mero. On Twitter, where they first began drawing followers in the late two-thousands, the pair supply a constant stream of punch lines, barbed commentary, and digital high-fives. As the hosts of the “Bodega Boys” podcast, they’ve recorded thousands of hours of unscripted conversation, and end each episode with a bespoke epilogue in which they exhaustively list their respective nicknames. (The Bodega Hive, the duo’s devoted fan base, has created several Reddit threads solely to collect said names.) And, since 2016, Baker and Martinez have hosted the television series “Desus & Mero”—first on Viceland, and now on Showtime. The series is a spry, lived-in take on the late-night talk show, its frequency set more to the stoop or the sofa than to the rigid ceremony of a production stage. Tune in long enough and you’ll learn the duo’s rhythms, their shorthand; you’ll also notice that they almost never repeat jokes or ideas. In September, they’ll release their first book together, “God-Level Knowledge Darts,” a parodic self-help text that tells readers how to deal with children, romantic partners, drug use, cops, and more. It is one more argument that, taken together, the duo is the most unrelenting force in comedy.

And so it should come as no surprise that they’ve Zoomed and recorded their way through quarantine. In fact, when they were set to take a hiatus from the second season of their show, in May, they briefly considered continuing apace. That didn’t happen, of course, but the series resumed this month, and the day after its return I hopped on a video call with its hosts. Desus wore a light-blue T-shirt that read “Zoom University,” and sat in front of a carefully curated wall of sneakers at his apartment, in the Bronx. Mero had dialled in from the basement of his house, in New Jersey, where he and his wife moved, in 2018, to raise their four kids. As we talked, it became clear that the pair are as dynamic off the air as on it. Desus and Mero aren’t just funnier than the competition; they’re ruthlessly agile, adaptive to any platform. For them, quarantine was another medium to conquer. And, as native New Yorkers during an extraordinary point in history, they feel a new urgency—and sincerity—about the state of the world. We discussed making television during a pandemic, being asked to take selfies with cops, their plans for the election, the return of the N.B.A., and more. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Carrie Battan: Until last week, you guys were on hiatus. Was that already scheduled, or related to COVID-19?

Desus: That was planned originally. But we were hitting our stride right before it happened. We were thinking, Should we not take a hiatus, and just work through it? But we found out very quickly that that’s illegal, according to SAG. You have to give the crew a chance to recover. Me and Mero, we’d do this show every day. There’s two hundred other people who have families and stuff. It’s just being humane.

Mero: If we were tech wizards and we could set up the lighting and stuff by ourselves, we could do the show every day, twice a day. You have to take into consideration the people who make the things run.

In March, what were the conversations like about transitioning to an at-home setup?

Desus: At first, [the idea of making a show in quarantine] was a joke. We didn’t think we’d get to a point where people would be locked in their homes for months. It happened so quickly. In a matter of three days, it went from “We might have to take a break” to “Yo, fam, you have to go to your apartment and you can’t come out.” We went home, and the Showtime team ran diagnostic tests on our Internet speeds. They sent the equipment out. We did a test show and it came out so well that we thought, All right, this works for us. I think most shows in Hollywood could not pull it off, but our show was the right format for it.

Mero: That’s always been our M.O. We’ve always been lo-fi, not too many bells and whistles. Going back to a more pared-down setup wasn’t hard at all.

Many people have literally nothing to do. Does that make it easier to book guests on the show?

Desus: It’s so weird, because we thought it would be easier to get guests. But some people have no availability, or they no longer have projects coming out that they’re trying to promote. And you’d be surprised by the number of celebrities who just cannot connect to Zoom. They have no one around them. There’s nothing sadder than a guest you’ve looked up to your whole life, and they have one AirPod in, they’re really close up to the camera, and they can’t get the angles right.

Mero: “Do I go into Preferences? Is that what I do?”

In your first episode after hiatus, your guest was the presumptive New York congressional nominee Jamaal Bowman. Given New York’s prominence, both in terms of the [Black Lives Matter] protests and the pandemic, do you feel like you’ll try to book more local politicians?

Mero: We talk about what the people want us to talk about. We listen to our fans. That’s why the tagline is “Late night for the people.” It’s not, just, “Bring in a celeb! Bring in a celeb!” We’re trying to make things a little more diverse.

Desus: I think, with everything going on now, we’ve realized that we’re blessed to have a platform. We’ve discussed getting more hyperlocal and political. It would be weird, with all the people protesting for their rights in the streets—we don’t want to have that going on, and you turn on our show and we’re making jokes about cats kissing each other inside of a pet store. There’s a responsibility there. We’re trying to balance fun with education.

When Dr. Anthony Fauci did his media tour recently, he made a number of appearances in Black and brown media outlets. Did he come to you guys with that specific intention?

Desus: There was definitely an outreach program. You could see it. They knew what community needed to find out that information. At the time, Trump was saying, “Don’t listen to him.” So we felt it was important to have him on. Where I live, in the Bronx, Mott Haven, it was hit really hard by the virus. A lot of people here are essential workers, or they’re older, or they’re in poverty. And I remember being in the supermarket and just hearing the conversations. People were saying corona was fake. The people in my neighborhood were not getting the message. It was smart of [Fauci’s team] to get out there and get the word out to the brown people.

Mero: Whoever set that press run up was a genius. The communities that were hit the hardest were Black and brown communities. People who aren’t necessarily watching MSNBC and CNN all day, the essential workers.

Fauci seemed like he was in a tough spot, trying to get information out without rankling Trump.

Desus: That was the weird thing about the interview. You want to ask him, “What’s it like working with a fucking idiot?” But you can’t ask him that. If you ask him that, you could ruin his career. Talking to him, you can see the restraint that he has. You can tell what he wants to say versus what he can say. So we got to talk to him about non-COVID stuff, about regular life. Make him an actual human to people. It’s a shame that Trump is putting him in a position where he seems like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Trump literally has presented the MyPillow guy as more of an authority than Dr. Fauci.

Do you know anyone personally who’s been sick?

Desus: My sister is an E.R. nurse who had symptoms. She had it bad. My other sister, who stayed home for three months, somehow caught it. We lost a friend who’s a rapper. You have those experiences, and you meet people in the supermarket who don’t put on masks. It exposes a problem in our country of everyone being too individualist.

Mero: It’s a weird, corny cliché to talk about the greater good. But it really is for the greater good. Just stay inside your house. If we’d listened to Anthony Fauci in the beginning, maybe we’d be outside barbecuing together now.

Desus: New Zealand did it well. They crushed it. We’re over here, like, “Are we ever going to go out again?”

One region of the world we’re not hearing much about, with respect to the pandemic, is the Caribbean. Do you guys have family in the Dominican Republic or Jamaica telling you what’s happening there?

Mero: My mom and my dad are in the D.R. It’s a different vibe over there. They don’t fuck around. They had fire trucks going around the street. Five-o’clock curfew. “If you’re not in your house, we are going to spray you with a firehose or you’re going to jail.” It’s not this massaging [that you see in America]: “Hey, guys, maybe you should wear a mask!” It’s very iron fist over there.

Desus: In Jamaica, it’s the same. It’s a small island, and they’re able to control it better. Now they’re looking at America, like, “What’s wrong with you?” They’re actually concerned about Americans coming to spread it. And it’s the beginning of hurricane season right now, which compounds everything. My cousins in Jamaica are always hitting me up, asking if we need anything.

Mero: Same here. It’s so wild.

Desus: They’ve offered to send Lysol wipes. And I’m, like, please, send them. In the Caribbean, Zika and dengue and all these mosquito-borne illnesses have ravaged those islands. My parents said they’re used to this.

Let’s say that one of you got sick in March or April. Are you in a position, at this point in your career, to have an inside track to testing?

Desus: I have no doubt Showtime has a doctor on deck. When we were first doing the at-home production, one of the cameras fell onto my MacBook and shattered the screen. I was, like, Oh, shit. The Apple Store is closed. What are we going to do? I texted the production team at Showtime and, no lie, within half an hour, an S.U.V. is in front of my building with a brand new Mac, completely equipped to do the show. Even while recording, they’re, like, “Hey, the battery meter on your computer looks a little low.”

Mero: “We’re going to send you two iMacs! It’s outside on your front step right now!”

Desus: If one of us gets sick, Showtime will either send over Dr. Fauci or one of the clones of us they built when we first signed our contract.

When the show went from Viceland to Showtime, you got a writers’ room for the first time. What was the process of building that room, and how did it change the perspective or tone of the show?

Mero: The tone of the show was always Desus and I bantering. That’s what people want. That’s the meat of the show. But, we figured, Hey, we’re going to a bigger platform and we have more resources, and we’re not trained sketch writers. So let’s get in a room with people who do this for a living. Using the new resources to make those sketches come to life, we thought that was dope. But the process of building itself was arduous.

Desus: So many people applied—the best of the best in Hollywood. But we’re lucky to be friends with some of the funniest people in TV. So, we thought, Let’s get people we know, who know what we’re going to say and the kind of direction we’d go in. I’ve been in some writers’ rooms that are miserable. Writers who probably drink too much and hate themselves. Our writers’ room is so much fun, our meetings go over time. We’re just shooting the shit.

That conversational, riffing vibe—how does that translate to Zoom?

Desus: It hasn’t changed. Everyone is quarantining, so it’s good to see people you haven’t seen in a while. You look forward to the meetings. You know how, in every other Zoom, when the meeting is over, everyone quickly closes the window? When our meetings end, you don’t see anyone moving for the button.

Mero: “You hang up first! No, you hang up first!”

Kanye West just announced his Presidential run. If he wanted to come on your show, would you take him?

Desus: Why not?

Mero: I feel like there’s nobody we wouldn’t take on the show unless they were totally heinous individuals.

Desus: When we first got a show, we couldn’t get any guests to come on. So we had to just go through our phones and contact people we knew. Recently, we interviewed this little girl who is going to college, Dr. Nina. People were asking why we’d interview her, since nobody knew who she was. But she’s this little Black girl. She’s going to college at age fourteen, and then planning to go to medical school. We thought, This is our chance to use our platform. Having her on will help change her life. Every now and then, little things like that come into play.

But we’d interview Kanye, for sure. It’d be an interesting interview.

You might not get much of an opportunity to talk.

Mero: You’d be surprised. We’re from the Bronx. We talk over everyone.

Over the years, you guys have changed your language to be more culturally sensitive—you’re constantly self-correcting, noting when old jokes have been ableist or misogynistic. Can you talk about that evolution?

Desus: You’ve got to remember, when we started, we were two guys from the Bronx who’d never even heard of a podcast. So the way we talked when we first started—it wasn’t so much that we were terrible people but we’d just never come into certain things. Common words that we used were slurs, and we’d never met the people to whom they were slurs. As we got more advanced and experienced, we realized they weren’t cool to say. And we wanted to reflect that growth on the podcast.

People come in and think we’re going to be just talking about rap and guns. But, if you get into the podcast, it’s very high-level. We want people to come away being entertained, but also learning a little. Every now and again, we’ll get people who’ll say we’ve sold out. But it’s, like, Fam, we’ve grown. Sorry if you don’t like it. We’re becoming better people. And we’re still funny.

A lot of comics are very insistent that they should be able to say whatever they want, as a means of protecting the art form.

Desus: It’s possible to be funny and not use slurs and offend people. People say, “You guys are P.C. snowflakes.” No, listen to the humor. The humor hasn’t changed. It’s not self-censoring. It’s just not being a jerk.

Mero: That’s the funniest part to me. When we do the podcast, we go off the rails sometimes. And yet we’re seen as the arbiters of political correctness. We’re just normal people who grew up in certain circumstances, and we grew. How hypocritical would it be for us to say, “This guy talking about Black and brown people is fucked up,” but then we turn around and make a gay joke. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to bring in everybody. The show is, like I said, the people. Whoever you are, we’re for you. And it’s not just a numbers game. Whatever community you belong to, we want you to say, “I like those dudes. They never said some shit that rubbed me the wrong way. They’re just funny, happy dudes.”

That energy translates. If you put out good, happy energy into the world, that’s good for everybody.

Your online fanbase is very active and very intense. Do you seek out the Bodega Hive’s feedback?

Desus: We don’t have to go looking for it. You get D.M.s, you get very long Instagram captions that don’t have anything to do with anything. On Father’s Day, I posted a picture of my father, and someone did a three-paragraph dissertation about what’s wrong with the show now. Delete! You have to balance the signal-to-noise ratio. But you also have to be able to hear what the fans are saying—if they liked a guest or a segment.

Mero: I had a problem early on differentiating constructive criticism from straight-up trolling. At the end of the day, we want to put out the best product possible. You can tell when it’s spam or trolling, and you can tell when it’s constructive.

A lot of your fans take issue with Joe Biden. How are you approaching that when it comes to election season? Are you trying to rally fans around Biden, even though he might not necessarily align with their politics?

Mero: I feel like Jamaal Bowman put it perfectly last night. It’s not about [Biden]. Once he gets in there, we have to hold him accountable. But, man, the guy in office right now is just . . . like, dude. Look at this.

Desus: This election is kind of similar to Newark Airport. You know how, after a certain hour, you don’t have choices for food at Newark Airport? You end up eating something you would never eat. You have no choice. Yes, we want a more radical candidate. You don’t have to get the pompoms out. But, at this point, voting for Joe is almost the equivalent of wearing a mask. This is what we need to do to get out of this. People say they’re having to choose between two evils, but, no: one person has killed a hundred thousand Americans.

Mero: With misinformation. With racism. With xenophobia. On a base level, you want the face of your country to be respectable.

Desus: Like Jamaal said, I don’t think this country can survive four more years of Trump. That’s not hyperbole. At the beginning of this term, people were saying, “Ha ha ha! How bad can it be?” Look at how bad it is! He’s out here doing popularity contests against the doctor in charge of dealing with the virus. He’s retweeting people saying “White power.” If the country is burning, we can’t just be out here making jokes. We have a responsibility. We have to tell everyone that the fun and games are over.

If Trump wanted to come on Desus and Mero to reach young Black and brown voters, what would you guys do?

Mero: That would be a very short or long interview. We wouldn’t hold back.

Desus: That’s the problem now. When he does interviews, he’ll say something, like, “I’ve raised employment for Black people to the highest level ever.” And they’ll just move on. It’s, like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean by that? People let him wild out in interviews. The media created this monster. If we ever got a chance to interview him, I guarantee you he would leave early.

Mero: It would be like the Ali G interview.

Or the DJ Envy interview.

Mero: Sometimes we make people uncomfortable!

You guys are known for speaking your minds, but you don’t often seem like you’re in conflict with people.

Mero: We’re nice! But if you say something about us we’re going to respond. We’re kids from the Bronx.

Desus: We crack jokes about famous people all the time. And now we’ll be at events where we run into them, and they think it’s funny. We ran into Donald Glover at a party, and he said, “Oh, Desus, I love the show.” And we’ve said so many foul things about Donald Glover. He has a sense of humor, and he gets it. Also, no beef on TV will be as serious as the beefs we’ve had in our real lives.

Mero: That part! This is Hollywood. None of y’all are going to come beat us up, or shoot us, or stab us. When we were growing up, that was a real possibility. That’s not going to happen with, I don’t know, Ansel Elgort. Random name. I don’t got no beef with you, I love you.

Ansel Elgort just got #MeToo’d a couple of weeks ago. [Elgort has denied allegations that he sexually assaulted a seventeen-year-old in 2014.]

Mero: That’s why his name was in my head! Damn.

Desus: We don’t really know him. Every now and then, we’ll reference someone, and people will point out that they’re a terrible person. We’re, like, Yo, fam, we don’t even know who they are.

Mero: They were just in celebrity row at Knicks games!

Desus: Which we will never be.

Because there’s bad blood between you and [the Knicks owner] James Dolan?

Desus: We’re on his radar. It’s a weird thing. People outside of New York, when they hear the Knicks, they’re like, Oh, yeah, Desus and Mero! We were in a national campaign for A.T. & T. as Knicks fans. We’re kind of a public-facing voice of the Knicks. We’re going to have to meet one day [with the organization] to reach common ground.

How do you guys think the Orlando N.B.A. reboot will pan out?

Mero: It’s looking worse by the day. Of all the states you could have picked, you picked the state with the dumbest governor. He’s, like, “Everyone go out and have fun!”

Desus: I don’t think people realize that we’re turning N.B.A. players into essential workers. We need sports so badly that we’ll make them risk their lives to play a crappy, diluted version of basketball that is not even going to satisfy people. The N.B.A. can barely control their players regularly. You’re telling multimillionaires who love to go out to night clubs that they have to stay at a Radisson? This is not going to end well. I know LeBron doesn’t agree with me. He wants his championship. But you talk to these people and they’re scared.

You guys have a book coming out in September. Mero, a lot of people don’t realize that you got your start a decade ago as a writer, doing a blog in all caps. Did you revisit that material and draw from it at all?

Mero: The blog was all stuff from 2007 and 2008. That was the version of me that was standing in front of the bodega drinking and smoking all day. I would get home from my job, and I would just hang out and talk shit. That was my universe, that corner. Some stuff that was on [the blog] would not translate to today, but it got me writing in the style of how I talk. When you go to school, you’re trained to write in a certain way, and it took a while to untrain myself. I would literally just talk to myself and type. That’s how I did the book.

Was it an enjoyable process?

Mero: It was fun. It felt good to write stuff that wasn’t a script or a treatment.

Desus: That book will be there forever. I used to work in a library, and every now and then you’d come across a book written by someone you’d completely forgotten about. They were hot for a year and they wrote a book. And that could be how people reach us in the future. That’s why we made it a little more personal. And, hopefully, God willing, it turns into a classic.

Mero: Canon!

Desus: People in the future will be taking midterms about this. “Now, I have to write about the symbolism of the chopped cheese!”

Mero: People will be writing a thesis about shoplifting.

I remember you had Spike Lee on the show. And, at the end of the interview, he was visibly impressed by you guys, and he said, “You guys got to do a movie.” Are there any plans in the works?

Desus: That’s the next level. We’re trying to write a movie. Production is closed down right now, so it’s the best time to pitch. We’re working on some things. Also, if anyone has a movie they want to plug us into, that’ll work, too. “Fast and Furious: Desus and Mero.” Holler at us. We’re going to be in “A Quiet Place 2,” but we’re going to die immediately because we’re very loud.

Did you guys manage to get out and protest?

Desus: I couldn’t avoid the protests. I went out grocery shopping, and I saw N.Y.P.D. with armor on their bikes. I’d never seen that in my whole life. That ended up being the big event in the Bronx where they beat the hell out of the protesters, and they were arresting people. I almost got caught in it—I had to run home. They locked people in. I wasn’t even planning to protest, but, seeing the way they did that, the next day, I had to come out. Even if you don’t want to protest, you end up being so outraged that you get out there. But always wearing a mask and being safe.

Mero: Everybody has their role to play in this. There are people who can get out in the street. There are people who have platforms like we have, and can use a megaphone to blast it out.

You have a section in the book about the criminal-justice system, where you talk about growing up, dealing with the cops and being arrested. But you also have more recent stories, about being confronted by cops only to realize that they’re fans. How do you process that?

Mero: Money changes things, but it doesn’t change everything. [Kanye] has the line about, Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga in a coupe. My automatic response to police is fear. It’s muscle memory. Even if I’m not doing anything wrong—taking my daughter to ballet class and doing twenty-five m.p.h.—if I see a cop in the rearview, I get nervous. So that brain training kind of fucks you up. When you’re in a situation and you turn around and the cops are nice to you, it’s, like, Are they fucking with me? Is this an episode of “Black Mirror”?

Desus: I remember I was at a Yankee game, and a cop said, “Hey, you, get over here.” I thought, I don’t know what I did, but I’m going to jail. And the cop said, “Hey, you’re Desus, right? Do the cop impression.” And I did the cop impression. And the other cop said, “Oh, shit, he does sound like Bobby!” That seems like a lighthearted interaction. That whole time, to the cops, I was Desus. But in my head I was Daniel from the Bronx. The fifteen-year-old kid who got stopped-and-frisked and had my genitals touched. The same guy who was illegally arrested by the cops, who lied and said I had a gun. Dealing with the cops is not fun. It’s not something I look forward to. The way we talk about cops on our podcast is not funny. It’s just the reality of being Black or brown in America.

At this point, you guys have the podcast, the show, the book, the live tours. And you have audiences across every kind of platform. What’s your North Star of success?

Mero: The bigger picture, speaking for myself, is that I always loved writing. I always wanted to write and create, and bring up other people. We got lucky. Obviously, there’s talent, but we got seen by the right people at the right time. There’s always gatekeepers at the top of the industry. So, if you get to that level, and you’re able to help somebody up from the same community, or from a different community, and tell their story, that’s something I really, really want to be able to do. Replace the sixty-five-year-old white dude. Now I’m the gatekeeper, and I say, “This is a dope story, and I want it to be heard.”

Desus: Definitely what Mero says. To go from being on one side of the table in those conference rooms, to making decisions. Deciding programming. Deciding budgets for shows. Deciding what gets green-lit. We’ve been those guys pitching stuff. We pitched our show to several networks who just looked at us, like, What are you even talking about? That’s not how TV is made. All those times, we knew what we could bring to the table. We know what it takes to make TV, and we know what people want to see. We know what the next form of TV wants to be. And we know that some of the people who passed on us are still making decisions. It’s what Mero says: we want to get into those rooms, and just switch it up. Change the face of television.

George Floyd’s murder has prompted a reckoning in corporate America about representation and equality. I know that you’ve been open about hiring women of color on your staff. Are you guys part of those conversations at Showtime, if they’re happening?

Mero: The funny thing is, that gets brought up a lot, as if we purposely sought out Black women so we can say, “Look, we have Black women working on our show!” No, we know them! They’re funny! The fact that they’re Black women is just the reality. Not every joke writer is a thirty-five-year-old white guy who went to Dartmouth. There are funny people everywhere.

Desus: Everyone is taking stock of their corporations and what they have to change. But, for us, once we make sure we’re doing the right thing on our show, then it radiates. Showtime is doing a good job, but they can do a better job. Everyone can.