The Best of 'Key & Peele' So Far This (Final) Season
Key & Peele is having a fantastic season — and, as it turns out, its final one. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are ending their Comedy Central show later this month, but this last round of episodes has already brought us sketches that any sane person would include on a list of all-time-best Key & Peele moments.
One of the finest was the recent “OK,” in which two women (Key and Peele) wait in a bar for the arrival of one woman’s boyfriend, who’s running very late. As Key’s character gets more irritated, she begins running through all the complaints she has about the guy, and the threats she imagines making to him. It’s essentially a long monologue by Key, broken up by Peele saying one word: “OK.”
The greatness of the sketch resides in Peele’s delivery of that one word. Peele puts an infinite variety of expression and stresses on the word, so that it communicates a wide range of reactions, from sympathy to indignation to puzzlement to wonder and beyond. It’s a remarkable feat of acting, and I’ve watched it over and over for the sheer pleasure of Peele’s performance:
The excellence of “OK” typifies one element that distinguishes Key & Peele from all other comedy shows. It’s that emphasis on character, concept, and performance — honing an idea down to its essence, and then committing to following that idea to its logical or illogical conclusion. You know the two men are funny, you know they have range, but they are foremost excellent actors.
The show takes care to frame those performances for maximum effectiveness.
Take, for instance, the amazing “Prepared for Terries” sketch. This one was an instant legend — its YouTube views currently hover near four million — with the duo made up in ludicrous yet unsettling facial-hair, accosting an innocent airplane passenger to enlist him in their hushed plan to subdue any potential “terries.”
“Terries? Do you mean terrorists?” asked the baffled, and a tad frightened, passenger. “Hell yeah, he ain’t talkin’ about no Teri Garr,” says Peele. “And I certainly ain’t talkin’ about no terry-cloth,” says Key. From the jump, Key and Peele are taking you into territory that is at once realistic (concern about airline safety) and absurd (the utterly self-created jargon in which these two ridiculous would-be heroes communicate; the delightfully random pop-culture references such as Teri Garr).
As is so often the case here, Key and Peele toy with an audience’s expectations of race and class. In some sketches, the viewer must initially wonder if Key and Peele are speaking in a kind of slang they don’t understand, or aren’t cool enough to comprehend. It most often turns out that the speech they’ve created is a actually a mash-up of sense and nonsense.
Working with director Peter Atencio, Key and Peele take immense care with the look of their sketches. Unlike other shows that either flaunt or work around their low budgets, a half-hour of Key & Peele offers an abundance of beautiful lighting and lush atmospherics. Even this season’s bumpers, the moments between sketches in which Key and Peele chat while driving in a car through a True Detective-style landscape, are richly cinematic. The special effects in a recent Cedric and Levi sketch, about literally catching lightning in a bottle, looks as good as your average fantasy film:
When Key and Peele leave Comedy Central at the end of their season later this month, they’ll leave behind a body of work the best of which can stand with anything done on SCTV or SNL. As a comedy team, they’re better actors than, say, Abbott and Costello, and only time will tell how they’ll rank in lasting impact. The pair have not ruled out reuniting again for TV projects, but it would still be a good idea to watch every remaining second of Key & Peele, and savor it.
Key and Peele airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on Comedy Central.