Sometimes we’ll be giggling at something and it will hit our funny spot and we’ll love it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t subscribe to schadenfreude. Peele: We don’t like to pick on the underdog. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele Don’t Pick On The Underdog. As ourselves, we can explore the fact that, even though it’s not a postrace world right now, it’s at least evolved enough that we as ourselves would not be able to hang physically or emotionally in that situation. For me, it became about how the modern human being, let alone the modern African-American like us, has no idea what those guys had to go through back then. Then it became an exploration of something else. I just decided not to do slave characters that we’d essentially be ourselves. The real eureka moment in writing that scene was when I had the idea to not be characters in it.
To me, if you can find the thing about slavery that actually makes people laugh in the right way, and is not offensive, that’s a treasure trove. That’s what’s going to be amazing, is when we do it.
I love if someone tells me, “Man, you can’t find 32 different football player looks and characters for one scene.” That to me is just a challenge. It was an attractive idea to me because I love impossible scenes or impossible situations. I think I was having a hard time figuring it out, though. What they see in the room is me standing up and saying, “Oh, oh, oh!” like “I have to get this out right now!” So basically, I wrote the scene, but it was based on just seeing that image. Jordan Peele: I don’t remember what we were talking about in the writers’ room, but I just got the image of Keegan and I standing next to a huge guy on a slave auction block, and my comedy alarm went off. Play With Racial Attitudes of Different Eras. Read on for the boundary-pushing duo’s approach to making racially informed sketches that aren’t explicitly about race. Key & Peele occupies its own lane in sketch comedy, informed by experience both in the performance sphere and in the creators’ respective upbringings. For more on global leaders in technology, design, media, music, movies, marketing, television, and sports, see Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People In Business 2013 report.
See our full feature on Key & Peele here.