DUO WILL BE MISSED
Brilliant sketch comics Key & Peele are leaving at the right time
KEY & PEELE The Comedy Network Thursdays
Each remaining episode of Key & Peele’s fifth season got more precious with the recent revelation that this season will be the show’s last.
Though it’s lately been overshadowed by fellow Comedy Centraller Amy Schumer, there’s every possibility that its run will come to be regarded as the definitive comedy document of its half- decade.
Nearly all of the really great sketch shows have had a unique hold on some kind of central animating idea. The Pythons loved to skewer the British sense of propriety and politesse, The Kids in the Hall were absolute geniuses at teasing out the desires and fears that lurked underneath middleclass, suburban- inspired life, the Mr. Show pulled apart the sensibilities of a generation raised by television, and teetered on the tipping point between media savvy and outright cynicism.
Like all of these shows, Key & Peele rode plenty of other undercurrents — few contemporary shows of any genre have a sharper understanding of modern manhood, in particular.
In more pleasant times, when we weren’t getting weekly reminders about just how brutally un- post anything about race still is, the duo were frequently treated as post- racial pioneers, though this never exactly fit: For all the gleefulness with which they indulged their personal identity- switching, plenty of the show’s humour relies on the fact that racial lines are still firmly drawn. Particularly now it just feels like the overt ways in which their own identities were split gave them a particular insight into the many faces we all wear, and how ridiculous it can be to try to reconcile them.
Nothing against their illustrious predecessors, but sketch acting is typically functional, a walking funny idea.
At its best, it plays off a well- crafted comic persona ( most of the Kids in the Hall, or all of Will Ferrell’s SNL work) or nails a very particular character ( David Cross’s white trash Ronnie Dobbs). But both Key and Peele are so committed and chameleonic, it’s tough to even identify what their personas are, other than Key tends to be more energetic, while Peele usually plays off a certain sense of calm.
As much as that elevates their sharpest work — Luther the anger translator is just another Obama joke in the hands of anyone who is even a shade less deliriously apoplectic as Key — its most functional benefit was that it sucked people into material that was often trickier than a casual read would suggest.
Stuff like the East- West bowl or the inner- city teacher parodies are fairly thin in point — if we wanted to get excessively Internet about it, I think you could even argue they ’re a bit conservative uncle in their “don’t black people have funny names” construction — but they blew up exactly because of the sheer lunacy Key and Peele imbued into those characters.
If anything, as the show has gone on, some of its sharp sensibility has drained — there’s only so much you can say on a topic, at least funnily — and it’s become a bit of an exploration of what, exactly, the pair can pull off. Fun as that can be to watch, comedy without ideas is more often flabby and forgettable, and certainly not anything that outlives its time and place. It’s probably better, then, that Key and Peele move on now, and try on an identity other than brilliant sketch comedians.