What they get, Peele conceded, as if it were a little embarrassing, is “a lot of love.” Partly, this is the license we tend to lend to (male) clowns, but it may also be a consequence of the antic freedom inherent in sketch, which, unlike sitcom, can present many different worlds simultaneously. They don’t attract anything approaching the kind of critique a sitcom like “Girls” seems to generate just by existing. Given these numbers, it’s striking how little online animus they inspire, despite their aim to make fun of everyone-men and women, all sexualities, any subculture, race, or nation-in repeated acts of equal-opportunity offending. Averaging two million on-air viewers, Key and Peele have a huge second life online, where their visually polished, byte-size, self-contained skits-easily extracted from each twenty-two-minute episode-rack up views in the many millions. A sketch show may seem a somewhat antique format, but it turns out that its traditional pleasures-three-minute scenes, meme-like catchphrases-dovetail neatly with online tastes. One of his most successful creations-a nightmarish, overly entitled young woman called Meegan-is an especially startling transformation: played in his own dark-brown skin, she somehow still reads as a white girl from the Jersey Shore.īetween chameleonic turns, the two men appear as themselves, casually introducing their sketches or riffing on them with a cozy intimacy, as if recommending a video on YouTube, where they are wildly popular. His Obama impersonation is uncanny, and it’s the voice and hands, rather than the makeup lightening his skin, that allow you to forget that he looks nothing like the President. ![]() But though Peele’s phenotype is less obviously malleable-you might not guess that he’s biracial at all-he is so convincing in voice and gesture that he makes you see what isn’t really there. He is biracial, the son of a white mother and a black father, as is Peele. Before he even gets near hair and makeup, Key can play black, Latino, South Asian, Native American, Arab, even Italian. Key is fond of sharply cut jackets and shiny shirts-like an ad exec on casual Friday-and looks forty-three the way Will Smith looked forty-three, which is not much. ![]() Peele, who is thirty-five, wears a nineties slacker uniform of sneakers, hoodie, and hipster specs. fit Peele is shorter, darker, more rounded, cute like a Teddy bear. Key is tall, light brown, dashingly high-cheek-boned, and L.A. She was going, ‘Oh! This is crazy! This is crazy!’ She just couldn’t believe it.” Call it method comedy. You got it done in the back like your mama would do.’ I said, ‘I promise you this is glued to my head.’ And she was squealing with delight. (Key-to steal a phrase from Nabokov-is “ideally bald.”) “And she wouldn’t leave until she saw me take my hair off, because she thought that I and all the other guest stars were fucking with her,” he recalled. On one occasion, a black actress, a guest star on the show, followed Key into his trailer, convinced that his wig was his actual hair. Subjects are satirized by way of precise imitation-you laugh harder because it looks like the real thing. ![]() Editing is a three-month process, if not longer. False mustaches do not hang limply: a strain of yak hair lends them body and shape. There are no fudged lines, crimes against drag, wobbling sets, or corpsing. ![]() (They are also the show’s main writers and executive producers.) They eschew the haphazard whatever’s-in-the-costume-box approach-enshrined by Monty Python and still operating on “Saturday Night Live”-in favor of a sleek, cinematic style. Between them, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele play all of these people, and more, on their hit Comedy Central sketch show, now in its fourth season. Individually made, using pots of hair clearly labelled-“Short Black/Brown, Human,” “Long Black, Human”-they are destined for the heads of a dazzling array of characters: old white sportscasters and young Arab gym posers rival Albanian/Macedonian restaurateurs a couple of trash-talking, churchgoing, African-American ladies and the President of the United States, to name a few. The wigs on “Key and Peele” are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business.
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