On a Sunday night earlier this month, Desus Nice and The Kid Mero—hosts of the eponymous Viceland late-night show Desus and Mero as well as the podcast Bodega Boys—strutted onstage at the LeFrak Concert Hall in Queens. Desus, born Daniel Baker, held a Jamaican flag aloft. Mero, born Joel Martinez, carried the Dominican Republic’s. The audience went wild, though it was later apparent that the D.R. crowd far outnumbered the Jamaicans in the house.

“That’s ’cause all my good Jamaicans are working right now,” Desus replied.

Though the duo had microphones and a table waiting behind them, they never sat down, instead standing to deliver stream-of-conscious jokes about current headlines and whatever else came to mind: the Mets and the Yankees, why vosotros sounds like a Harry Potter spell, why diapers are cruel (“You’re paying for someone to shit on the money you earn,” Mero, who has four children, reasoned). As they often do on their podcast, the pair reminisced about their early days in the comedy world, when Mero said he “had more kids than I had shirts.”

“You had two kids back then,” Desus said.

“And I had one shirt,” said Mero, finishing the gag.

This is a familiar set-up for their live shows. The pair, both Bronx natives, just concluded their first New York tour, making a stop in every borough and wrapping things up over the weekend with a sold-out performance in Brooklyn. While their Viceland series established them as brash, new voices in the homogenous, mostly white suit-and-tie realm of late night—you’ll never catch the duo in formalwear on Desus and Mero—the New York tour displayed their status as hometown heroes, acute voices of an ever-changing city. Desus and Mero might have arrived thanks to their show, but they’re only getting bigger. Throwing a five-borough tour in the middle of their jam-packed TV and podcast schedule? That’s a flex.

The warm but rowdy live shows are “like a giant basement hangout with all your friends,” Mero said in a phone interview with the pair last week. After their Apollo Theater show in Harlem, he had a particularly humbling moment. “That was my first time ever being inside the Apollo. I’ve walked past it a million times . . . but to go from never being in a venue, to selling it out? On the ride home, it kind of blew my mind.”

“We’re rubbing the same stump, getting the same reactions, in the same green room,” Desus added. “We have to take it in, like yo, we did this.”

Just a few years ago, Desus and Mero were two separate, but very funny guys floating around the Internet. Mero blogged about pop culture, parlaying it into absurdist, all-caps music and style reviews for Vice. Desus was an oft-retweeted comedian with a regular, degular day job who punched out 140-character observations about pop culture through a Bronxite prism (tweets about Timberlands and camo shorts and Jennifer Lopez were—and still are—plentiful). They eventually built a quick rapport, with Desus as the quick-witted, punch-line king to Mero’s unpredictable, blue humorist. They ran through a few projects before eventually hitting their stride on the Bodega Boys podcast, which is stacked with so many inside jokes at this point that newcomers might get whiplash (the introductions to the podcast alone runs several minutes long because the duo have to recite their laundry list of nicknames). Their fanbase grew so large that they, too, earned a nickname—the Bodegahive. Then, Viceland came calling, and fans got to watch their favorite Twitter personalities become the most brolic brand on late-night television. They may not pull in the same ratings as late-night king Stephen Colbert, but they’ve captured the zeitgeist. And if you need hard proof of their success, you could do worse than observing a series of sold-out live shows in the media capital of the world.