Key & Peele on Race Relations

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele

I first heard about Key & Peele last year, when Fast Company ranked the 18th among 100 of the most creative people in business for 2013:

“The audience loves to figure things out,” says Key, who has extensive professional acting experience and a unique physicality honed by aping silent masters such as Chaplin and Keaton. “They love it when a performer leaves a trail of bread crumbs for them, and they get to participate in the comedy.”

I am writing a book on innovation, and worked my way steadily through this Fast Company list as part of my research.  But I didn't  look into their act, until I saw the following video my Google+ timeline:

I nearly fell out of my seat laughing.  At nearly 56 million views, I imagine quite a few others found this classroom sketch so hilarious, too. The duo have over 150 videos on the Comedy Central channel on YouTube, and I've watched several of them now.  Not all of them grabbed me the way this first video did, but their work impressed me as very intelligent and insightful.  I love it when any piece of art, and their work is definitely art, makes me think, taps my curiosity, calls on me to look at it again and again.

In this regard, this week I gather a few sketches centered around a theme, such as race relations in this article, for I believe they illuminate things about us as people.  They speak to the multifaceted nature of what I call The Human Algorithm.

There is comedy in the cultural divide between the Black substitute teacher and his White students in the above sketch.  Key & Peele poke fun at how names are so culturally derived.  The substitute teacher is in charge, so his pronunciation is de facto the correct one.

A dangerous winter road phenomenon - Black Ice - triggers an amusing but tense standoff between two White anchors and a Black weatherman and reporter.  There is, literally and figuratively, dark comedy in the very stitching of this sketch.

I've heard stereotypes about the sexual endowment and prowess of Black men, and these two White women play them up in this sketch.  In character, Key & Peele overhear them, and it's human nature to relish the positive in one breath then scoff at the negative in the second breath.  Of course the comedic twist is that some people talk the talk, but don't necessarily intend to walk the walk.

 

These last two sketches are as funny and deft as they are powerful and disturbing, such a fine line to tow, but Key & Peele are clearly not afraid to do so.  It is part of our humanity that we've relegated one segment of us into buffoons on the big screen and cattle on the blocks.  But more than that, in the last sketch, is the underlying, more profound need to be wanted, never mind that it's about slavery.