The prospect of a large corporation (like CBS, Showtime’s parent company) hiring subversive talent (like Desus and Mero) is always tantalizing, though not necessarily in the way the large corporation might hope. This particular week, the biggest story in America is the college-admissions scandal that ensnared, among many others, the actress Felicity Huffman, whose husband, William H. Macy, is a star of Shameless, the longest-running series on … Showtime! There is practically no chance Desus and Mero will avoid either the subject—it was a parade of white privilege—or the awkward coincidence. And they don’t.

“This is very exciting for me,” Mero announced during the TV taping, bouncing in his seat. “A bunch of rich white people got arrested!” They rolled a clip of Huffman, and at the mention of Macy’s name, Mero yelped, “SHOWTIME yaaaaah!,” while Desus, with mock indignation, insisted that their own hands were clean. That other Showtime series, he assured the world, “has no relation with us.”

Desus and Mero are well aware that as their audience swells, it will include some white viewers who watch the show less for comic relief than for a crash course in wokeness. Or “a hood safari,” to use Desus’s phrase. The dynamic also works in reverse, though: Desus & Mero is a sort of cultural Trojan horse, using laughs to slip past the gatekeepers, then, once inside, taking over the joint. Somehow they manage to clown a chunk of their audience and enlighten it at the same time. Take me, for instance: I’m a 40-ish white dad who doesn’t need to watch Desus & Mero to know what deadass means, but I’ve picked up some pointers about how to use it in a sentence. Not that I would ever try.

This can be a fraught dynamic, of course. In the years since his heyday on Comedy Central, Dave Chappelle has talked about feeling eaten alive by the fear that he was helping white people laugh at black people. But Desus and Mero don’t see it quite like that. “The thing of the show is, it should never feel like you’re watching us,” Desus explains to me. “What we want you to feel like is you’re in the middle.”

“You’re participating along with us,” Mero adds.

“A lot of times people watch this show and immediately hate it,” Desus says. “They’re like, ‘You talk too fast,’ ‘I don’t get any references,’ whatever. But you stick with it—all the time we have people who hated it and now they love it.”

Comedians tend to have more demons than the average person, and Desus and Mero, who are 37 and 35, respectively, have had to work through their share. They grew up a few miles apart—Desus in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, Mero in Kingsbridge, then Throgs Neck—and met in summer school, but didn’t become good friends until years later, when Twitter brought them together. Desus, the son of Jamaican immigrants, worked all kinds of lousy jobs in his late teens and 20s, including tech support for a pornography website, which required him to learn, in exhaustive detail, which types of sexual imagery were illegal in which countries. Mero, whose family is Dominican, absorbed his father’s cynicism about life in the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s: “He was always very anti-establishment. I almost wanna say anti-America. He was just mad at the country, and I was like, ‘Why are you so mad at this place?’ And then he broke it down for me.” Mero took the lessons to heart, and after brief stints at Hunter College, in the mail room and IT department at Lehman Brothers, and as a special-education teacher—the one job he actually liked—he started behaving badly.