Desus and Mero's late-night Showtime talk show aims to be a “mash-up of The Daily Show and the Chappelle's Show"

The New York Times

In a New York Times Magazine profile timed with this morning's Showtime announcement that Desus Nice (AKA Daniel Baker) and The Kid Mero (AKA Joel Martinez) are starting a weekly late-night show, Jazmine Hughes goes behind the scenes of the pair's Viceland series and reveals what they have in store at the pay cable network. "Unlike on Viceland, where their comedy was purely verbal, the move will give Baker and Martinez the ability to blow their jokes out visually," she writes. As Hughes explains, Viceland's Desus  & Mero "has been the answer for anyone in search of a rundown of pop culture from young people who also regularly waste hours surfing the web while slightly stoned. But more important, in a landscape in which black people dominate the culture but have few recognized channels to respond to it, the show, which stars two American black men, provides a venue for black authority in the mainstream. Their rapport has proved so popular that more-established networks have taken notice. Unlike their late-night peers, the pair don’t have an impeccably plotted approach to the show: They just talk, a geyser of whip-smart running commentary, seamlessly building off each other’s jokes, able to anticipate and carry each other like dancers or jazz musicians. That night, they did a seven-minute segment on West’s appearance on TMZ, offering very little setup — if you knew, you knew. Instead, they just reacted to what they saw, talking in between snippets of footage, saying the same sort of thing we were all thinking, but funnier."