Few pieces of visual media have confused and disconcerted me as much as this, yet I cannot stop watching it and I laugh harder every time.Ģ. They incessantly harass a passenger sitting next to them (guest star Malcolm Barrett) with assurance that if they see some “terries trying to get froggy,” they plan to “fireboard those motherjammers,” among other puzzling terms with that grow increasingly frightening as the context becomes clearer.įrom Key and Peele’s insanely ridiculous haircuts and facial hair to their mind-numbing vocabulary, this is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen, and I do not mean that exclusively to the sketches of Key & Peele. In one of the most puzzling and outrageous sketches Key & Peele has ever conceived, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele play two men on an airplane with bizarre haircuts and facial hair sculpting. I have struggled for a long time with my ability to explain my love for Key & Peele’s “Prepared for Terries” sketch, but I'll try to verbalize as best as I can. There are some things that you cannot even begin to explain why you find them funny, but, shamelessly, you just do. Prepared for Terries (Season 5, Episode 1) “Black Ice” is the kind of Key & Peele sketch you can go back to over and over again, and it never gets old.ģ.

This is the kind of social satire that the likes of Jonathan Swift or George Orwell would bow down to, cleverly sneaking in analogies to racial discrimination disguised as a discussion of weather conditions until the white anchors’ hilariously blunt reveal of their true opinions the end. I think Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s finest example of racial satire is “Black Ice.”Ī Minnesota weatherman (Keegan-Michael Key) and a field reporter (Jordan Peele) take offense to their white news anchors’ off-putting description (and pronunciation) of the hazardous driving condition that commonly occurs in winter known as “black ice.” Key and Peele combat this indictment of “black ice” by speaking out against “oppressive white snow” and the many unfair criticisms that “black ice” often falls victim too. What I am certain of is that these classic Key & Peele characters (who inspired a Toy Story 4 teaser trailer with Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s Ducky and Bunny) are aggressively entertaining and always go out with a bang… literally.įew shows comment on social issues, such as race, with wit as razor-sharp as Key & Peele. Why the valets express their love for these pop culture icons in such misconstrued and exuberant ways, and how they always seem to use pluralization incorrectly, I do not know. As they wait for their next guest to park for, they swap over-enthusiastic analyses of their favorite movies and television shows, reciting Games in Thrones almost in its entirety, inquiring why Gotham’s criminals even bother messing with “The Batmans,” praising the filmographies of Die Hard’s “Bruce Willy” and Taken’s “Liam Neesons,” and even popping up in the 17th century to criticize Shakespeare’s Othello. You know those recurring sketches on Saturday Night Live that start off pretty good until they repeat the formula over and over again and eventually lose all steam completely? I cannot say the same about any recurring sketches in Key & Peele.Ĭase in point, these pop-culture obsessed valets for a fancy hotel played by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. You can always rely on Key & Peele for both laughs and thrills and this is my favorite example of both. Clive finds the idea of speaking to a puppet utterly ridiculous, until his conversation with Little Homie takes a dark turn.Īs I said before, Little Homie quickly turns into a surprisingly unnerving experience as it plays out, and the punchline, as easy as it may be to predict in retrospect, is executed brilliantly. What gave it away was how in any Key & Peele sketch that would incorporate elements of horror, it kept up with its serious tone until the punchline came, just like in this surprisingly unnerving sketch.įormer convict Clive “Double Down” Ruggins (Keegan-Michael Key) thinks he is going in for a normal first visit with his parole officer, Daniel Tate (Jordan Peele), until he discovers that Tate still uses a conversational method from his days working for the juvenile corrections system: a puppet named Little Homie. I always had a feeling that Jordan Peele would make a great horror filmmaker even before the release of his 2017 Academy Award-winning thriller Get Out.

Key and peele substitute