‘Desus & Mero’ are Reinventing Political Late Night Comedy

In the last few years, late night comedy has morphed into aggressive, angry, and pointed political attacks on President Trump’s administration, and witty deep dives into super serious issues. Sure Jimmy Fallon is tricking Kendall Jenner into eating shoes over on The Tonight Show, but for the most part, late night comedy has gotten into the habit of taking its job very seriously.

Not necessarily so on Desus & Mero. Showtime’s relaunch of the Viceland hit is injecting a much needed irreverent swagger back into the late night landscape. Hosted by the Bodega Boys, aka Desus Nice and The Kid Mero, the show is both deceptively smart and utterly delightful. (Who else by Desus and Mero can flit between dropping “pedagogy” into the conversation and then call everyone “ballbags”?) But what’s most interesting about Desus & Mero is how the show is reimagining political comedy as something fun, and something specifically local.

The first thing you’ll notice about Desus & Mero is they don’t start their show standing in front of an audience or sitting behind a bossman’s desk. They’re leaning back in soft, huge chairs, with open drinks between them. So when they’re delivering jokes about the week’s news, it doesn’t sound like a polished monologue written by graduates of the Harvard Lampoon and Upright Citizen’s Brigade; it just sounds like two really smart and funny guys shooting the shit.

Desus Nice and The Kid Mero don’t just bring a fresh vibe of authenticity to their topical humor. When Desus and Mero go in on politicians, they don’t attack with facts or fury. They instead choose to slam the likes of Trump, Obama, Michael Cohen, Cory Booker, and the rest of the political establishment in an brutal, old school way. They make actual fun of them.

Consider segments where they go after President Obama for wearing “dad jeans” and lecturing young men, or how they rip into an unflattering photo of Cory Booker. They’re not delivering blows to anyone’s record, but they are revealing some embarrassing truths. Like how Obama does have an odd tendency of “scolding” young black men, and Cory Booker does look like a Walmart greeter in that one cringe-worthy photo. And the way they tackle Vladimir Putin isn’t to throw down a homophobic joke about his relationship with Trump, but to point out how he really does run like Mero’s two-year-old daughter. The jokes are silly, giddy, and a little bit mean. However, that just makes them all the more strangely cathartic.

So far Desus & Mero has been saving their biggest political commentary for their pre-taped segments. It’s all about what they choose to endorse as opposed to what they want to tear down. The show’s premiere episode on Showtime featured two segments with the current darling of the Democratic-led House, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While her booking — and the candid conversations about double standards with her, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — feels like an implicit endorsement of her politics, what’s more important is that she is a Bronx native. So are Desus and Mero.

While Mero is technically now a resident of New Jersey, both Desus and Mero identify strongly with Bronx culture. It appears in the show’s styling, slang, and political purpose. You see, they don’t just prop up a local politician in the show’s premiere, but in the following episode they devote a segment to struggling bodega owners. By highlighting the problems caused by gentrification, Desus and Mero are proving loyalty to their home neighborhood. Their political focus isn’t on Washington, but what’s happening in their borough.

In the most recent episode, Desus Nice and The Kid Mero made a wholly different kind of political comedy choice: they veered away from it. Instead of getting bogged down in the outrage over Ilhan Omar’s comments, they focused on R. Kelly’s damning interview with Gayle King, the Momo hoax, and Rami Malek’s inexplicably creepy ad for Mandarin Oriental. However, they still managed to make a pointed political statement when Desus shrugged off his confusion over what the hotel chain even was by arguing, “There’s no Mandarin Oriental’s in the Bronx.” Then he riffed on the clear class divide between Bronx culture and the ultra luxe hotel chain.

Desus & Mero might be approaching political humor with an ultra-specific slant, but it’s one that matters. When the media devotes all their attention on the President’s tweets and latest Congressional scandals, massive events that rock local communities go underreported. As citizens we have a duty to not only hold our federal government accountable, but to stay invested in our community’s politics. Desus & Mero champion that, and they do it in a way that makes political comedy fun for the first time in forever.

Watch Desus & Mero on Showtime