JIG'S UP

I nominated Twitter heroes Desus Nice and the Kid Mero for a Peabody Award. This is my nomination form.

Desus vs. Mero vs. The World

Think back, if you can, to two and a half weeks ago. Kanye West has just released “Only One,” a touching tribute to his infant daughter, featuring some guy named Paul McCartney. White Beatles fans, grasping for any shred of relevance, come out of the woodwork in protest, condemning the song as if McCartney is somehow slumming by working with Kanye. Seeing an opportunity to stir the pot, social media trolls join the conversation, firing off “who is Paul McCartney?” tweets to rile up the unenlightened. They accomplish their mission: the irony, as per usual, goes completely over the heads of mainstream media outlets. The “news” makes Good Morning America. Glenn Beck is foaming at the mouth. A WASP-y anchor reads one of the tweets: “Kanye has a great ear for talent. This Paul McCartney guy gonna be huge one day.” “Poor folks, they just don’t know any better,” he smirks.

         That tweet is the brainchild of one Desus Nice from the Bronx, New York, who happens to be one of the hottest Internet media personalities of the moment among those in the know. The backlash his McCartney joke received from those not in the know is indicative of the type of content he and his partner, fellow Bronxite the Kid Mero, deliver regularly: hip, mocking, and provocative in a way that not everyone understands – in one word, savvy. Together, Desus and Mero comprise Complex Media’s brilliant weekly podcast, Desus vs. Mero, an online video series in which the duo sits before a green screen at a table made of plastic crates and cardboard boxes and riffs on the past several days in New York news, hip-hop, basketball, and pop culture. It’s like a Bronx-centric Daily Show, except its “redeeming social value” is its lack thereof: impenetrably offensive, the podcast combines its hosts’ off-the-grid street smarts with the hard, responsive wit of their independently successful Twitter accounts. Desus, a sharp-tongued Bronx native of Jamaican parentage, and Mero, a loud, burly Dominican with two kids and a Jewish wife, serve their refreshingly unique takes on topics as diverse as white supremacist David Duke (who “came back out of nowhere like a racist D’Angelo, so shouts to him”), convicted Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda (whose breakout single “Hot Nigga” was “a Rap Genius (annotation) of every crime he’s committed”), and the abysmal day-to-day of this season’s Knicks (“Carmelo out here dressed like Tom Wolfe”) with the amused detachment of lifelong New Yorkers.

Consequently, their jokes can be New York-normative to the point of obscurity to outsiders, but that’s part of their appeal: picking up on the joke is central to its pleasure. Take one of Desus’ tweets: “’What if I told you MLK wasn’t the only one with a dream?’ ESPN 30 for 30 presents: ‘Longer than Selma: The Road To The Knicks’ 6^th Win.’” The joke is exemplary of Desus and Mero’s brand of comedy. In order to “get” it, you have to understand that a.) the Knicks, at game 42, had only won five games, the last one more than a month previously, b.) the game was played on Martin Luther King Day, c.) the Academy Awards had snubbed Selma earlier that day, and d). the tweet is winkingly parodying ESPN’s overblown promos for its own programs. These are what Desus calls “levels;” the unfortunate irony is that exegesis of these levels tends to diminish the strength of their humor. So if the power of “getting it” is the main comedic weapon in Desus & Mero’s arsenal, could audiences not getting it be their drawback?

Fortunately, the humor is corrosive enough to seep through social barriers, and despite their topical fixation on emic phenomena, Desus vs. Mero’s reach is widespread. In its year and a half of existence, the podcast’s influence on the way people think about culture has been subtly groundbreaking. Some of its many catchphrases – “peak caucasity,” “struggle rappers,” “knowledge darts” – have caught on in the lexicon in such a way that if you don’t know their meanings, you probably would have no use for them. Yet these tags have worked their way into places no one would expect: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who grew up with Desus in the Bronx, has adopted his old friend’s sardonic quip “gotta hear both sides” on his show All In, most notably as a criticism of President Obama’s public iffyness over the protests against police misconduct in Ferguson, MO. #Caucasity is a popular Vine tag. “I be making up words y’all use,” reads Mero’s Twitter bio, and it’s not an empty boast: the duo’s microsocial influence extends beyond their (substantial) audience and into the very mainstream media that they scoff at. Desus and Mero don’t just participate in conversations. They don’t just steer conversations. They start conversations.

Desus’ McCartney stunt is a prime example of how the hosts self-reflexively generate buzz – its humor is accessible only to those who keep up, but when it works best it provokes a response even from those who are behind. Desus was delighted with the reaction to the tweet, engaging the benighted on social media and capitalizing on the opportunity for self-promotion. “What’s a good show where I can go and apologize to Yacubians?” he wondered, using the now-common term he coined for “white devils,” or followers of the demon Yacub. “700 Club? Mike & Molly? Friends on Netflix?” Mero jumped in on the playful antagonism: “Why the dudes trolling Desus look like Jake Fogelnest with wild nutrient deficiencies?”

These whimsical aggressions aren’t just oppositional to white people – they’re oppositional to anyone who doesn’t get it. This doesn’t make them elitist, though: there’s room for everyone in DvM land, those who get it and those who don’t. Desus once posited that white people in Brooklyn like to put cucumbers in their water “to make it less spicy,” to an overwhelming if expected barrage of responses that “water isn’t spicy.” The social response Desus and Mero elicit is almost as much a part of their content as the content itself. Their outreach involves those it skewers, and they’ve even hosted on the show some of the people they mock most viciously, like child Vine star Lil Terrio. So while as comedians they ostensibly prefer obscurantism to didacticism, their worldview is comprehensive enough to offer something of a cultural schooling to those left out of the loop, but only after the benighted have endured the requisite ribbing. They’re not just a cult act, they’re educational. They’re ground zero for objective cool, telling the same stories as other popular media to a wide audience from a first-hand perspective, and with a detached authenticity so pure and severe as to be meta: as the ultimate source of cultural commentary, Desus vs. Mero means culture commenting on itself.

          All stars possess this sort of self-awareness; the first sign of it for D&M came right when their audio-only podcast was becoming popular enough for Complex to scrape together the funding to upgrade it to a video format. A few days before their laptop-screen debut, Mero tweeted a picture of himself and a bearded white guy – “Desus and Mero in the flesh,” read the caption. The fanbase went nuts: they didn’t know whether to believe that Desus was actually white; his Twitter avatar had always been, cryptically, a dog wearing a balaclava. Desus couldn’t be white – he couldn’t be the genuine authority and source of cultural commentary he seemed to be if he looked like that, people responded. For several days, Desus played along with the joke, amending his #whitepeopleareawesome hashtag with #yesweare. After the first video episode aired, the jokes that have come to be known as “Desusgate” were put to rest – Desus is black – but the anxiety that a cultural icon so hip could be disgraced simply by showing his face had already come to light. Desus retweeted Mero’s picture with a new caption: “GENTRIFICATION.”

The beauty of Desus vs. Mero evident in Desusgate is that the show hasn’t yet been and probably won’t be “gentrified,” even as the Bronx Bullies become stars. That beauty is sustained by the fact that the duo has become stars in about the hippest way possible. Chris Hayes started interacting with them online around April of last year. In August, Texans running back Arian Foster nominated Desus for the Ice Bucket Challenge. In November, they were profiled in New York Magazine, where Mero revealed that he had been collaborating with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig on a couple of TV projects. Last night, the duo made their debut on MTV2’s Guy Codes; within the last week, both of them have been verified on Twitter.

Perhaps their most high-profile appearance outside the Internet (Good Morning America notwithstanding) was Desus’ appearance on CNN’s Parts Unknown, where he served as former Peabody winner Anthony Bourdain’s tour guide of the Bronx. Bourdain’s particular strength is finding “real” food and “real” culture in places where “fake” people – tourists, Yacubians, people who defend the Beatles in online arguments – would never think to go; like Desus and Mero, his calling card is authenticity. His deference to Desus as a primary source alongside such illustrious hip-hop innovators as Afrika Bambaataa and Melle Mel suggests that Desus is here to stay, and that, like in the early days of hip-hop, there’s a new cultural revolution brewing in New York right now, a revolution of authenticity and genuinity. Desus and Mero are the first figureheads to document it.

Desus and Mero are the real item: cultural tour guides to anyone interested in seeing more than the attractions, challengers of those who aren’t. No matter how popular they get, they can’t sell out, because their appeal is their “realness.” Their authenticity is their product, and it’s a product that even canonizing institutions as prominent as the Peabody Awards can not contaminate, only bolster. Of course, not everybody gets that they’re important, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not; it just means that we’re all living in a world where influence is relative, and it takes special power to be able to pull everyone, including the unknowing, into your sway. Even those who don’t get it are active participants in a rapidly disseminating worldview oppositional to the middle American status quo and East Coast bourgeois preciousness that the unenlightened haters espouse. In a way, these haters are unwitting agents in a Desus and Mero world.

Poor folks. They just don’t know any better.