And their assembled audience — drawn from their respectable Twitter following (about one million people, combined), a good portion of black and Latino people in the New York City area under 35, and anyone who didn’t want to see a white man in a suit pontificate about what might be going through West’s head — rejoiced! Here were two down-to-earth guys assessing the situation for what it was, with the cultural awareness that necessitated the conversation but none of the corniness that typically comes with having a show that comes on after 10:30 p.m. Finally! Someone who knew what they were talking about.

For the past year and a half, Baker and Martinez have traveled four times a week to the unassuming concrete building on the Williamsburg waterfront that holds the Vice offices. Their show is filmed in what’s called the Bear Room, named for the full-size taxidermied bear that permanently resides there, which, because it was Weed Week when I visited, was dressed in four green Timberlands, a bong mask and a baseball cap that read “Legalize It.” When I arrived, Baker and Martinez were discussing the ubiquity of fecal matter in New York City while their makeup artist powdered their shiny spots. Moments later, when the camera switched on, they went into professional mode, which wasn’t that different from how they had been speaking moments earlier.

On most late-night shows, when the host, whether it’s Meyers or John Oliver or Samantha Bee, introduces a segment, it can be tonally similar to the actual news, with detailed context to a story and graphics over their right shoulders. Even the purely comedic bits on these shows are traditional: setup, punch line, audience applause.

Baker and Martinez, on the other hand, rely on a conversational comedy that comes naturally to them. They balance each other: Baker tends to lay down the foundation of a joke, and Martinez heightens it with sound effects, physical humor or a string of expletives. Their show is built partly on the ebb and flow of black Twitter, which is less a tangible space and more an educated curation; Baker gave me the most lucid description of it I’ve heard: “The other day somebody was like, ‘There’s no such thing as gay sex because gay sex to gay people is just sex.’ Black Twitter is just Twitter for black people.” Even if you’re not following black Twitter, you’re likely consuming the media it produces without realizing it: Everything from viral memes to hashtag movements that can bleed quickly into the mainstream, often without attribution. “What black Twitter says is often ignored,” Victor Lopez, the pair’s manager, told me. But because both men are immersed in it, they can, he explained, “represent that on TV.”

Baker and Martinez once told me the story of the rise of Tyrone Hankerson Jr., who was accused of stealing $429,000 from Howard University’s financial-aid office. The morning the story broke, students from Howard were tweeting excitedly at Baker and Martinez, anxiously awaiting their take. The pair held off at first, but by the time they started taping that afternoon, the story was all over Twitter, inspiring a day of memes and jokes. That night’s episode opened with Hankerson. Whatever black Twitter is talking about, Baker told me, “that’s what the show is talking about.”

The show is divided into three sections. In the A block, they riff on the day’s pop culture (on the Kentucky Derby: “Who won? Justify the winner. What does he get now?” “He gets to not be glue. For another two years”), politics (on the coal baron Don Blankenship’s Senate run: “You don’t hear that term anymore in 2018 — coal baron.” “What does he do in his off time, tie people to train tracks?”) and sports (on a distant home run in Fenway Park: “He hit that ball so hard it landed where the black people in Boston be at. Interrupted a Bell Biv Devoe concert”). Then they move on to guest interviews, and shout-outs, where they discuss their favorite viral moments from the week. There are no writers: Every morning, the small team of producers collects news stories and videos they think the pair will enjoy discussing, often from Baker and Martinez’s own Twitter feeds, and drop them into a Google doc, which is on display on a large computer screen just out of view of the camera. The producers will write a few introductory sentences setting up a clip, but then Baker and Martinez just riff, saying what they want. It’s a humble effort: The full staff numbers only about 25 people. “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” by comparison, employs almost seven times that.

Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s “All in With Chris Hayes,” appeared on “Desus and Mero” during its first year; he and Baker attended Pablo Casals Middle School together in the Bronx and still keep in touch. He told me that he appreciates the show’s specificity of a world that’s so rarely represented on TV. “As a person who exists in the world of making a TV show and often feels like the power of convention can be really overwhelming, there’s something extremely refreshing about how different that show feels in its entirety,” he said. “It just feels like a new thing, and that’s really hard to pull off on TV.”