Lead Blog Post: Key & Peele

It's not uncommon in this day and age when your friend shows you a funny video and you both laugh. Maybe it's a cat doing a backflip, maybe it's Pennywise the clown selling penis enlargement pills, maybe it's something else. I remember my friend coming to me one day in 8th grade begging me to watch a video. The video was titled "Substitute Teacher" and it showed a high school substitute teacher continuously pronouncing his students' names wrong. I found it hilarious. The next week, the same friend showed me a  different video. This one was called "Fraternity Branding", and it was just as funny: two college guys try to brand each other with their fraternity's symbols, and one of them completely botches it. One small detail I noticed was that the two characters in the video were both in the "Substitute Teacher" video. I looked at Comedy Central's Youtube channel and I found these two videos as well as many others with the same two characters. I had found a unique genre of comedy: Key & Peele. Key & Peele, also known as Keegan-Micael Kay (Key) and Jordan Peele, are two actors who create and perform skits for Comedy Central's Youtube channel. Each skit is unique and features both Key and Peele taking on different roles. Some of them, like Substitute Teacher, mainly focus on one of the two. For example, in "Continental Breakfast", Key is a hotel manager who is reminding Peele about the hotel's continental breakfast, and the video focuses on Peele enjoying the continental breakfast a little too much. Other videos involve multiple other people. "Loco Gangsters" puts Key in the position of a gang leader, and Peele is a younger gang member who is struggling to gain the others' support.
I could sit here and keep describing every episode of Key & Peele, but let's face it, nobody would read that. I have linked some of my favorite episodes if you really want to laugh. Overall, I think the humor in Key & Peele is superiority humor because the characters in the skits are generally not very smart, and do some pretty stupid things. In other words, the content of Key & Peele is laughable because the characters do things that are so asinine to normal people that we consider them to be hilarious.  A perfect example is in "Continental Breakfast" when Peele says "Pulling into Spain" and takes a bite out of the side of a banana with the peel still on. Nobody would ever do such a thing, so we think it is hilarious.

Comments

  1. Shane HerronSeptember 26, 2018 at 7:42 AM

    I love so many of their skits. I actually have not seen a bunch of these so thanks for sharing. I wonder if anyone has seen Get Out, Jordan Peele's movie, and how they think the comedy relates to Key and Peele?

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