Daniel Baker and Joel Martinez, professionally known as Desus Nice and the Kid Mero, remind me of my own cousins. It was standard routine on Saturday afternoons for all of us Rodriguez kids to congregate in my grandmother’s living room. We would shuttle in from respective barrios between Washington Heights and the South Bronx to spend hours trading witty banter, riffing on the latest family gossip, opining on recent blockbusters, and arguing who the best rapper alive is. To the outside world, we were loud-mouthed, rough-around-edges, less-than-proper and all. To us, we were the only legitimate experts of our experiences and knew that what we had to say — less-than-proper and all — mattered. Desus and Mero are poignant reminders of just that as the pair’s iconic era in comedy and nighttime entertainment comes to an end.
