Last year, when Amazon broke the news that Long Island City in Queens would host its new headquarters, New Yorkers cried foul over the head-spinning tax breaks and the irreparable harm its corporate presence would do to the area’s cultural identity. Not quite so bothered were Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost, who first suggested that Queens would be the harmful influence on Amazon and not the other way round (cut to graphic of a package dressed in leopard-print clothing).

Jost then added: “Only New Yorkers could complain about getting 25,000 new jobs. All the cities who lost out must be like, ‘Shut up, you whiny bitches.’ New York basically won the lottery and thought, ‘Well, the subways will be more crowded.’”

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Desus and Mero exist for anyone enraged by the tone-deafness of the former president of the Harvard Lampoon telling working-class New Yorkers to suck it up and deal. The Twitter loudmouths and Bronx natives known as Desus Nice and The Kid Mero don’t consider their new series on Showtime to be part of the late-night landscape, but if it quacks like one, goes out at 11pm, and parodies the week in pop culture and politics, it’s probably a late-night duck. No need to fear the label, though; Desus and Mero fill a much-needed vacuum in the culture of TV by being sane, regular human beings with roots in a world viewers can recognize. As they have said before, Desus and Mero are for the people.

Thursday night’s revival, following the team’s acrimonious split from their previous network home of Viceland, begins with a group of schoolchildren roasting the hosts in a pre-taped segment. The kids ask the questions Desus and Mero anticipate from the wider audience Showtime would ostensibly bring. Why must they wear hats indoors? Why do you have a TV show if you’re not really famous? Aren’t they kind of ghetto for TV? They answer in the same way they respond to anyone who claims not to “get” their oft-mentioned brand: those are your problems.

The sizable viewership known as the Bodega hive – named after the Bodega Boys podcast that initially launched the pair’s career as must-listen commentators – intuitively understands their style, their language, and their ideology. This is, in no small part, because Desus is African American and Mero is Latino, identities that inform their comedy in meaningful, palpable ways. Like so many Americans outside the entertainment industry’s upper crust, they think of Barack Obama as a rich person first and a black person second. (Obama gets playfully raked over the coals for a recent, grandad-esque speech in which he denounced hip-hop’s material excesses while flanked by the “swaggerless” Steph Curry.)

They cover the new propaganda video from Vladimir Putin, a viral ad from a soulless fentanyl company, and the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine’s snitch bargain without the setup-punchline structure endemic to late-night, instead freely riffing on a theme and following the laugh. Their technique has origins in sports-shouting programs like Pardon the Interruption and the 24-hour diss contest that is Twitter, where clowning has been elevated to an art form. On Viceland, Desus and Mero worked without any assistance from a writers’ room, and taking on Josh Gondelman as head writer for the show’s new incarnation hasn’t changed the foundation of their comedy. Aside from the occasional Photoshopped graphic, they’re not tinkering with the formula for success.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the show. Photograph: Greg Endries/Showtime

The bump in budget only makes itself known when they run the clips bringing their personalities out of the studio, first to grill strangers on the streets of New York, then for a Green Book parody with sharper teeth than most. To close out the show, they head to DC for a Bronx-approved makeover of the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office to accompany their in-studio interview. That Ocasio-Cortez would be the new iteration’s first guest couldn’t be more appropriate: she’s also won a following for breaking into a white-dominated institution with frankness, reason, and a refreshing contempt for the 1%.

As Desus and Mero continue to grow in a showbiz economy that sorely needs them, the challenge will be to not join the ranks of the rich and detached that they’ve always mocked. When the kids in the opening accuse Desus and Mero of being nobodies, they’re eager to point out that they can FaceTime with Nick Cannon whenever they want. They now face the same test as any artist pinning their sense of self on authenticity – of getting too big for their own good. But anyone with the temerity to question Desus and Mero’s ability to keep it real should consider themselves forewarned. They could very well be the next object of on-air ridicule.