How N.J.'s The Kid Mero became one of the freshest voices in late-night TV

By any other name, The Kid Mero would still be The Kid Mero.

Still, he's got a lot of other names. 

On his late-night talk show, "Desus & Mero," and on social media, the Bronx-reared North Jersey resident has always gone by Mero. But alongside Desus Nice, his partner in comedy and riffs on the popular "Bodega Boys" podcast, he presides over a long list of aliases. For several minutes at the end of each episode, Mero recites the names as though he's pressing the fast-forward button on a sacred, joyous rite.

The Dominican Don Dada, aka The Human Durag Flap, aka your boy, The Kid Mero, aka Donovan McDabb, aka Curve Gotti, aka Trizz Khalifa, aka SKKRRT Loder -- jump the curb, hit your dog, keep it movin', give a f***, I don't care.

He acts out each moniker with a different accent and character, sometimes even breaking into song. But there's more.

Light-an-L Dutchie (*sings* Hello? Is it weed you're looking for? I can see it in your eyes .. that your broke a** ain't got five) aka Fry-an-L Messi, The Plantain Supernova in the Sky, aka Xaniel Bedingfield, aka the Xandman, aka The East Tremont Stevie B.

And that's just a small selection. The "akas," one of the treasured, self-referential hallmarks of the podcast and the freewheeling spirit behind them, are part of what made Bronx duo The Kid Mero and Desus Nice such hot commodities.

Photos courtesy of Desus and Mero

The brand, already strong, grows stronger

In 2016, Desus Nice, aka Daniel Baker (pictured at left above), and The Kid Mero, aka Joel (Jo-el) Martinez, emerged as vital voices in a late-night landscape that, while evolving, remains dominated by white men. A penchant for masterful riffs propelled Baker, who is Jamaican American, and Martinez, who is Dominican American, to become hosts of "Desus & Mero" on Viceland.

After a not-so-pleasant parting of ways with the cable network this past summer, the duo is set to deliver their next project, Showtime's first late-night show, next year. There's also a book on the horizon. In other words -- words familiar to any fan -- the brand is strong, the brand is brolic, and the brand is headed for Showtime.

On Sunday, the pair will be at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden for "Bodega Boys Live" as part of the New York Comedy Festival.

We recently spoke to Martinez about comedy, the new talk show, why he could be the ambassador for Bergen County, that "beef" with DJ Envy and the joys of just being himself.

'Voices that are not typically heard on television'

Desus and Mero's reputation, honed on their podcast and web series, landed them the nightly talk show on Viceland for just shy of two years and 135 episodes.

From their studio at Vice headquarters in Brooklyn, the two set up shop in front of a taxidermied grizzly bear wearing Timberlands and a Yankees hat. They quickly proved to be as adept at making cracks about viral videos and dissecting conversation pieces (speeches from Trump and Obama, plus footage of people who dress like horses) as interviewing celebrities.

Their guests ranged from lights of hip-hop culture (Method Man, Joe Budden, Fetty Wap and Cardi B before she was a national sensation) to actors and comedians (Whoopi Goldberg, Rashida Jones, John Cena, Hannibal Buress, Rosie Perez and Michael B. Jordan) along with other notables (Bill Nye the Science Guy).

"I had no dreams of being on TV and it just kind of happened," Martinez says. "Which is wild because now that I look at it, hindsight is 20/20, and it was just like, 'oh, this was bound to happen. These are voices that are not typically heard on television and they should be heard. And if somebody's going to do it, why not me?'"

(Caution: Video clip above contains some explicit language)

Frederick M. Brown | Getty Images

A dramatic exit

But after what seemed like a lovefest at Viceland, "Desus & Mero" made a sudden departure this past summer. The duo said the network got wind of their deal with Showtime and decided to cancel the show two months before their contract was up.

Martinez and Baker, both 35, felt like they had to carry the new network -- and its ratings -- on their backs, and had been unhappy with the jam-packed schedule of the show.

"We were literally the LeBron of that network," Martinez told Bossip in July. "As a dad, you wanna be around for milestones for like graduations, birthdays ... and it's obnoxious to have to be like, 'I can't go to my kid's graduation because we leave the studio at 3 o'clock and the graduation is at 4."

While he prefers not to elaborate further on the dramatic exit, Martinez describes the Desus and Mero path to success as "the internet to MTV, MTV to Viceland and Viceland to Showtime."

His secret power

It all started when Desus and Mero were each separately developing a robust Twitter following (in Mero's case, with the caps lock ON). At the time, Baker was bored by his job as a finance columnist, and Martinez was an aide at a junior high school. They used the social network to broadcast their inimitable riffs on current events, politics, sports and rappers. If you weren't following those 140-character morsels, you were missing out.

The duo actually first met in the Bronx when they were younger, in summer school.

Martinez's "Mero" nickname -- you might even call it his first alias -- comes from Romero, which is what his father and uncle wanted to call him instead of Joel. From a young age, he knew he had a certain something that could light up a room.

"It's going to sound kind of Kanye-ish, but I knew I was funny," he says.

"When I was a kid, my parents would literally make me do stand-up for my entire family. We lived in a two-family house and it was basically like Ellis Island for every one of my family members. All my aunts and uncles that came from the Dominican Republic stayed with me in that house and my grandmother, my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister, my cousins, and we would have parties and my dad in particular would literally be like, 'do an impression of your uncle!' and I would do like an impression of like, my drunk uncle and have half the room in stitches.

"I was like, 'Oh, I got it! I cracked the code. This is my secret power. This is how I'm going to get out of trouble, by making people laugh.'"

From the internet to TV (but podcasts, always podcasts)

After drawing a loyal following to his Blogspot blog, Victory Light, starting in 2012, Martinez began applying his winning perspective to music reviews for the Vice website Noisey, writing them in his signature caps lock.

His refreshing, take-no-prisoners style is apparent in his 2013 assessment of "We Can't Stop" from the Miley Cyrus album "Bangerz": "I WOULD LITERALLY RATHER LISTEN TO FRENCH MONTANA READ THE BURGER KING BREAKFAST MENU OVER THE SOUNDS OF ORPHANS CRYING THAN LISTEN TO THIS SONG B."

Baker and Martinez officially teamed up starting in 2013 on the Complex web series and podcast "Desus vs. Mero." On the show, they sat behind stacked milk crates topped with cardboard, talking about rappers, social media and pop culture, occasionally drinking cognac from red plastic cups. The idea was to conjure the feel of sitting outside a bodega.

In 2014, "Desus vs. Mero" drew the attention of MTV, which recruited the duo for the MTV2 series "Guy Code," "Uncommon Sense with Charlamagne" and "Joking Off." From there, in 2015, Martinez and Baker plugged their winning formula into "Bodega Boys," their second podcast, before launching "Desus & Mero" in the 11 p.m. timeslot on Viceland.

(Caution: Video clip above contains some explicit language)

School aide-turned-internet celebrity

When he was working on "Desus vs. Mero," Martinez would clock out from his job at the junior high school and take the D train downtown to record the podcast.

"I was just really happy to have that little extra wiggle room, financially," he says. "My actual plan was to teach."

Working as an assistant at the school, he was also enrolled in an accelerated degree program at Hunter College. He planned to teach earth science and biology at a middle or high school (when his kids get old enough to ask about symbiotic relationships between animals, he'll be ready).

"I've had kids that I've taught see me on TV or see me on Instagram," he says. "It's really heartwarming to have kids that related to you.

"Being a black Dominican guy from the Bronx, the area I was teaching in was heavily black and Latino. They looked at me as kind of like big brother. We used the same slang, we dressed alike and all that kind of stuff," he says.

Then there were the off moments when a child would hurl an explicit comment unmentionable here.

"What? You're 12, where'd you learn that?" Martinez would wonder. "What are you watching? Did your parents take the parental controls off of YouTube, like what's going on?"

Moving to New Jersey

As inseparable as the Bronx-proud partners in comedy may be -- they were born just three days apart -- Martinez now lives across the river from Baker.

Mero's Twitter bio may eternally say "EAST TREMONT AVE," in homage to his neighborhood in the Bronx, but as Desus and Mero's profile rose a year and a half ago, Martinez moved to Fair Lawn.

"Fat Joe the rapper told me, 'You live in the Bronx. When you get money, you're supposed to move to New Jersey,'" he says. "If you were to be from Queens, you are supposed to move to Long Island. That is a Fat Joe rule and if there's anybody that you take seriously in life, it's Fat Joe. So I followed his advice and now I live in Bergen County." (Fat Joe, who also hails from the Bronx, has lived in Tenafly and Paramus, where he famously licked the bottom of a sneaker in his at-home sneaker room on MTV's "Cribs.")

"I always tell people, 'All your favorite New Yorkers live in New Jersey,'" Martinez says. He and his wife, Heather, live in the Bergen County borough on the banks of the Passaic River with their three sons, ages 7, 5 and 3, and 1-year-old daughter.

"I live on a dead-end street but I like to call it a cul-de-sac to sound fancy," he says. "And it's just way more chill.

"If I ever wanna feel that Latino vibe that I miss, the Bronx, that ethnic food, rice and beans, platas -- the plantains -- all that type of stuff, I can just get in my car and literally drive three minutes and be in Paterson. So I got everything I want."

Getting acquainted with Fair Lawn

Fair Lawn also happens to be where Heather, who worked as a teacher in New York for more than a decade, is from.

"Entertainment's very fickle and it's very risky to put your family's future in something like that, but she believed in me," he says. "She believed in my talent and she dropped her thing to focus on the kids and let me go and do the TV thing, and here we are," Martinez says.

But when he got wind of the name of the Fair Lawn High School sports teams -- the Cutters -- he was at a loss. Thoughts of self-harming teenagers filled his head.

"I was like, that's dark and hilarious," he told Heather.

"What do you mean?" she replied. "It's a boat." (Turns out the team's name comes from football players deciding to cut class in 1943 to see a movie in Paterson. They were suspended from a game before returning to pull off a victory in the second half.)

Still, as fans of his podcast should know, there's another reason why Martinez is loving Jersey. Hint: it's why he would have bought a house on busy Paramus Road, were it not for his wife's fear that the kids would run out and get hit by a car. It rhymes with "Barden Bate Blaza."

"I think I was born to live in Jersey because I love malls," he says. "Malls are so ill to me, because it's like, you go, you people-watch. My favorite thing to do is to get stoned and go to the mall. There's nothing like it."

The art of the riff

After "Desus & Mero" went off the air this past summer, Martinez and Baker continued to host the "Bodega Boys" podcast, which delivers more than an hour of riffy goodness (and its own A-listers) every Monday.

"We have always thought of the podcast as kind of like the breeding ground for the ideas that we expand upon," Martinez says. "The podcast has always been the crown jewel of what we do."

With "Desus vs. Mero," they used a list of topics as fuel for their conflagration of riffs. With "Bodega Boys," they embraced a more off-the-cuff approach.

"It became less and less structured as we went along, and I think that that's the beauty of it," he says. "It's kind of like Langston Hughes-ish. It's like stream of consciousness, but it hits. It's not just babbling."

On the podcast, Trump is "Trumpito" and no one is off limits as Martinez and Baker effortlessly bounce between seemingly disparate topics. In a recent episode featuring Jonah Hill, they shuttled from the so-called MAGA bomber to the price of stamps and diagnoses for sexually transmitted diseases. From there, they jumped to Scientology, tipping while famous, and which ninja turtle they would be -- and which ninja turtle each "Sex and the City" character would be. But they didn't stop there. Which ninja turtle would each "Sopranos" character would be? And would racist "Sopranos" dialogue make it to air in today's climate?

Honesty really was the best policy

"The beautiful thing about being yourself is that you never have to keep your guard up," Martinez says. "There's some people who develop a persona and then they use that persona to do their act. My act is me. The same way I talk with Desus, I talk with my little brother. It's not put on."

"That's why I appreciate people like Tracy Morgan and Patrice O'Neal (rest in peace). They were just themselves. They just told it how it was."

Morgan (who lives in Alpine) in particular was a big influence on Martinez, since he went to the same high school, DeWitt Clinton in the Bronx. Martinez read the comedian's autobiography and found that the guidance counselor who put Morgan on the right path was the same one that did just that for him, "which tripped me out," he says. Seeing Morgan's stand-up for the first time, he realized he could get by on observational jokes, just telling it like it is.

Other influences for Martinez included Eddie Murphy (despite what Martinez calls his "problematic" past material), who he calls "a Swiss Army knife of comedy," as well as Chris Rock, the Dominican comedian Boruga (Felipe Polanco) and Dave Chappelle, who he once spotted eating breakfast in Turks and Caicos with his wife, but didn't want to intrude.

"I was like, I don't wanna be that guy, like, 'hey, Dave!' while he's in here, like, yogurt and granola."

Jamie McCarthy | Getty Images

Desus and Mero vs. DJ Envy

Desus and Mero's unfiltered approach made at least one high-profile frenemy along the way. ("My thing is always punch up, never punch down," Martinez says.)

On an episode of "Desus & Mero" in March, they cued up footage of DJ Envy from radio station Power 105, aka Raashaun Casey, on a talk show with his wife, Gia Casey, addressing the subject of his infidelity. The Kinnelon resident said he was Raashaun at home and DJ Envy in the streets. His wife said she wasn't acquainted with the DJ.

"You knew a DJ Envy check, though," Baker said. When Desus and Mero were guests on the Power 105 morning show "The Breakfast Club," Envy demanded an apology for insinuating Gia was with him for the money, and eventually walked out of the interview. The encounter went viral.

Martinez, who performed a post-mortem analysis with Baker on "Desus & Mero," calls the rift water under the bridge, but remains perplexed by Envy's response.

"I was actually taken aback by his reaction, because it was like, you're also somebody who comments on pop culture, so if you do this for a living, I don't understand how you can not kinda have a thicker skin," he says. "I don't want to hang my hat on that, but it was a viral moment and it happened. There will be more."

Breaking new ground at Showtime

The new Desus and Mero Showtime series, still untitled, will premiere at some point next year. Despite various reports that it will be a weekly half-hour show, the format is not set in stone, Martinez says.

"They're giving us the resources, they're giving us the autonomy, they're giving us everything that we need to make a great show and now the ball is in our court," he says. "And I like to shoot threes, so I'm going to drain it."

But for anyone who is worried that they won't get their fill of Desus and Mero (and anyone who doesn't have Showtime) Martinez says there will be plenty of digital extras on the way. And "Bodega Boys" will continue as the late-night show premieres.

"They're trying to build on the foundation of what we've already built with the fanbase and bring more people in."

The Bronx duo have also expanded their offerings beyond TV and podcasts. Next year brings a joint book from Random House. On December 7, they can be heard in "Neo Yokio: Pink Christmas," a holiday special from the Netflix animated series created by Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig (who grew up in Glen Ridge). In the series, which follows a bachelor demon slayer (Jaden Smith) in an alternate version of New York, they play the characters Gottlieb (Desus) and Lexy (Mero) alongside others voiced by Susan Sarandon, Jason Schwartzman and Jude Law.

'Bodega Boys Live'

Earlier this year, Desus and Mero went on a five-borough tour of New York, draping themselves in the Dominican and Jamaican flags onstage (they're pictured above at the Apollo Theater in Harlem). Martinez says they'll never recycle material, but will bring a similar approach to their upcoming gig.

"When we do our live podcast, our live show, it's more like a double stand-up show because we never sit down, we're walking across the stage, we're interacting with the crowd," Martinez says.

"The response is immediate. To me, I love that. I love that instant gratification of having a joke land. And having a theater full of people in stitches, dying, rolling over laughing."

He's also glad to win the approval of another crowd: his parents.

"It's funny because being first generation and having immigrant parents, they don't see entertainment as a real job," Martinez says. "A lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, you know, something like that, that's a real job. TV, doing jokes is not a real job. Now, they're like, 'wait a minute. There's billboards with your face on it, so I guess it is a real job.'"

At this moment, he's also happy to please another member of his family.

"This is great," he says. "Now I'm in The Star-Ledger. I'm going to be validated by my mother-in-law. I've been in The New York Times three times, and nothing."

Desus Nice and The Kid Mero will be at the New York Comedy Festival at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 11 at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden; nycomedyfestival.com

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.