Hi, Desus and Mero. How are you?
Desus: I just had some mac’n’cheese and I really shouldn’t have. [I’m] lactose intolerant. But it was worth it.
Sounds uncomfortable. You’ve put out quite a few bizarre origin stories explaining how you became friends. Are you pulling our leg?
Mero: The more ridiculous the story is, the faker it is.
Desus: We’ve done so many of these interviews and you get asked that question so many times that you just start making stuff up.
So … how did you first hook up?
Desus: We were locked up together in Bronx Bookings (1).
Mero: And he got stabbed.
Desus: And my lactose intolerance began. I came into the cell with the wild diarrhea and he passed me toilet paper and we bonded ever since then.
Mero: And he got stabbed, too, at the same time.
Sounds perfectly feasible. Which celebrity couple are you all most like?
Mero: Maybe Bobby and Whitney. Both very successful and very self-destructive.
That’s very topical. The New Edition movie just finished showing on BET.
Mero: So you already know. Yo, Bobby was really out here wilding. There’s footage of him [where it looks like he’s] dropping an eight-ball of coke on stage while he’s doing a choreographed dance number and bending over to pick it up like it was part of it.
Desus: Don’t judge.
Mero: I’m not judging. I’m impressed.
Desus: And that was, like, 80s coke. So you know it was that fire.
You’ve been criticized for airing sexist views in the past. Have you cleaned things up now?
Desus: When we started at Complex, with Desus vs Mero (2), we both had actual jobs going nowhere. There was nothing to lose. It was just a podcast. It was a one-off. We didn’t have the huge audience like that, so we could say whatever. Also, we weren’t as –
Mero: –woke!
Desus: Exactly.
Mero: We’re two dudes from the Bronx. I feel like that gets overlooked so much. The fact that we were way more problematic in 2011 or 2012 or 2013 than we are now is kind of like a testament to like, yo – we come from a certain background where that’s what we know. But through living life, and meeting people and reading –
Desus: – and friends, and social media, you become more woke. There’s definitely jokes that we would say in Desus vs Mero that we would never say today.
On your Viceland show, you seem to have calmed down a bit. You’re not as mad as you were on the podcasts. Why is that?
Desus: If you listen to [the podcasts], we’re very angry. I hated my job, I hated everything.
Mero: I hated anybody that had money.
Desus: We both were just venting. We hated life.
Mero: It wasn’t shock for shock’s sake. It was just like, this is just how we talk. And this is how we would talk if we were standing in front of the bodega siphoning a beer.
Desus: We’d always get comments like, ‘Be better feminists, or be better this,’ and at the time we were like, ‘What does that mean?’ Even within Desus vs Mero, you can see we’re not self-censoring, but we’re self-correcting ourselves on certain topics. And [we have] the Problematic Light (3). If you invested in it, it kind of paid off because you’re like, ‘Yo, they came around.’ We’re like the shitty boyfriend that got off the couch and got a job.
Mero: Our fans check us all the time.
Desus: We’re not that offensive. Nah, but it’s cool. We have fans all over. We have, like, 68-year-old white women who love the show. They see us in the street and shake.
Shake?
Mero: Like [making his arms tremble] Justin Bieber. Like: ‘I just met Michael Jackson.’ But it’s extremely varied. Sixty-eight-year-old white person, 20-year-old black woman, 10-year-old Asian kid. Everybody will come up to us randomly in the street. It’s dope. Without even trying to, we’re covering a lot of bases. If people fuck with you in that way, I kinda feel like they think you are a voice for them, and that’s dope. And if such a wide variety of people feel like we’re a voice for them, that’s really cool.
You’ve dedicated an episode to debating when something is officially over or washed (4). As experts, how do you know when you’re passé?
Mero: I think the world tells you. There are some people who are washed, and they continue to press on despite the world telling them that they’re washed, and they’re doing the wrong thing. I feel like when our time is done, we’re gonna also continue to press on and ignore society and do shows in Vegas.
Desus: Your body tells you, when you wake up and your body hurts for no reason whatsoever.
Mero: That’s life-washed.
Desus: Career-washed is like, you can’t get a script. You get no respect on Twitter. You’re not even verified on Twitter any more. They take it away. And you’re like a meme, but not in a good way.
Footnotes
(1) They actually met online.
(2) Their podcast and web series that ran from 2013 to 2014.
(3) This is an imaginary light that goes off whenever they say something problematic.
(4) The worst thing you can be.
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