'Key & Peele,'
playing the race card
The comics in this Comedy Central show are biracial
By Tom Conroy
Jan 31, 2012
The question of “how black” someone or something is can be a touchy subject. Comedy Central’s new sketch comedy “Key & Peele” throws another element into the discussion.
In the opening of the premiere episode, which airs tonight at 10:30, the show’s two stars, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, tell the studio audience that they’re “biracial, half-black and half-white.” They also say that their regular speaking voices are “whiter than Mitt Romney in a snowstorm.” Although this might lead us to assume that their comedy will benefit from a different perspective on racial issues, only a few of the sketches that follow present a fresh take.
Fortunately, many of the bits are funny. Enough of them hit the mark to justify adding the show to the DVR list.
The premiere episode, one of two submitted for review, works the degrees-of-blackness angle more than the second. In the opening sketch, the two stars play black men talking quietly in public on cell phones in their Mitt Romney accents. When they spot each other, they both raise their voices and start talking “street.”
Other sketches address men’s need to appear tough. Two husbands get together and swap stories about how they called their wives “bitch,” while going to ever greater lengths to make sure their wives don’t hear them. In a recurring bit, Peele, as the rapper Lil Wayne, poses as a gangsta in prison until the real gangstas around him put him in his place.
The husbands sketch goes on too long, and the Lil Wayne bits are pointless. In fact, the sketches in which race isn’t an issue are funnier. Key plays a Gordon Ramsay type who delivers one of those endless “you’re eliminated/you’re not eliminated” speeches that are de rigueur on reality competition shows. And Peele plays a guy who wants to buy medical marijuana who doesn’t understand that he doesn’t really have to be sick.
The second episode is more consistently funny than the first. The two principals, as actors in a play featuring Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, go off script in a battle for applause from the overly participatory audience. In drag, they play a pair of airheaded girlfriends who keep shooting and then deleting pictures of themselves.
The sketches are generally shot single-camera, without an audience. In between, Key and Peele do a little two-man standup comedy in front of a live audience. In one hilarious routine, they re-create what it’s like to watch white guys fight outside a bar at 2 a.m.
Regardless of the strength of their premises, the sketches are well constructed, with beginnings, middles and ends. Unlike “Saturday Night Live,” on which sketches often feel padded out to fill the space between commercials, this show ends the bits when their comic potential is depleted.
Even with these two talented performers, the comic potential of biraciality would probably be depleted quickly. This isn’t yet a postracial society, but postracial comedy will probably be the key to this show’s success.
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