The Development of Key and Peele Told Through Hip Hop
The Ultimate Love Story
Hip hop culture has always been ingrained into the lives and careers of both Key and Peele, with both making a cameo on Weird Al’s infamous White and Nerdy, and with the duo receiving an Emmy nomination for their 2008 song, Sad Fitty Cent, which featured Fifty Cent(Jordan Peele) uncharacteristically lamenting in a ballad about Kanye West’s better sales than himself. This common theme remains throughout their acclaimed sketch show Key and Peele, running for 5 seasons from 2012–2015.
STAGE 1: THE NEST
The Nest is where you’re comfortable — it’s a place of refuge, a comfortable zone. Season 1 and 2 of Key and Peele occur in the nest. They don’t venture too far outside of what they were used to on MAD TV. Key and Peele are doing what they know best and what they love: hip hop.
In the cold open for Season 1 Episode 2, we see Key intently freestyling, when Obama(Peele) drives up, says “I’m the leader of the free world,” and therefore, demolishes Key in their ‘rap battle’.
There’s nothing particularly innovative, exciting, or challenging about the sketch. It’s a safe cold open that warms the audience up, gets a few chuckles, and transitions into the episode. They’re in the nest. Key and Peele aren’t venturing outside of their comfort zones quite yet.
Their next hip hop sketch occurs in October 2012 in Season 2, and it’s another song — this time about Chris Brown(Peele) and Rihanna(Key). The song features lyrics from Brown like “tonight, I’m gonna hit that … don’t try to fight back” and lyrics from Rihanna like “let’s just walk and take it slow, in crowded places so they’ll know that you’re back with me.” The lyrics are accompanied with characterizing dance moves, with Brown nearly, but not quite hitting Rihanna every time he says “I’m gonna hit that,” and Rihanna flinching in response.
Here, we see a much more controversial issue, albeit 3 years removed from the actual issue. In an interview on Sway in the Morning, Peele says, “It’s that elephant in the room. It already has the edge. If you can figure out how to do that in a graceful way and in a way where you’re not just hitting a woman to get a laugh out of that.”
While they may have tried to approach the Chris Brown and Rihanna situation gracefully, they are as obvious as possible when talking about the idea of a conscious, aware rapper versus the superficial, thuggish rapper, as shown in the skit “Bling Benzy & Da Struggle.” Key, playing Da Struggle who seems to be a parody of Common, tries to talk about how he uses “words and rhymes to get through hard times,” However, Bling Benzy(Peele) forcefully interrupts with misogynistic lyrics. This back and forth continues until Da Struggle decides he’s struggled enough and gives up. Just like so commonly in mainstream hip hop, the objectifying, shallow lyricism mixed with hard-hitting, trap beats seems to win over the thoughtful, introspective lyrics of Da Struggle.
Their final hip hop sketch of Season 2 features a parody of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s famous The Crossroads. In it, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony now becomes Bone Thugs-N-Homelessness, where they make some surprisingly apt, depressing observations about homelessness. They rap about cyclical perpetuation of homelessness because “we live in a system where nobody’s giving away,” and personal loss of contact with family members. “I miss my Uncle Charles, y’all. He had some gall havin’ a ball. Brother can’t even return my calls.” The skit concludes with an image of a (literally) white collar, white man walking past them, ignoring them, and with one member spraying a seemingly invisible “wall” separating them from the walking man.
Again, there’s imagery and lyricism which interplays well with the comedic parody nature of the skit. In particular, the final scene of the invisible wall particularly stands out as a fantastic commentary of the separation and severe inequality which plagues America. Every bird, however, has to leave their nest at some point.
STAGE 2: EXPLORATION
Seasons 3 and 4 of Key and Peele are truly where they honed in on their craft, creating some of the funniest, most famous skits like “Slap Ass,” or the return of Hingle McCringleberry in “Excessive Celebration.” Much of the 2 seasons are refined and built off of recurring characters and segments. Originally, Key and Peele weren’t even “gonna do recurring characters until [they] figured out a new way to do it. By season two, [they] were trying to figure out how to avoid some of the inherent challenges with it that [they’d] seen in other sketch shows throughout history.”
This acts as clear evidence of the evolution of their comedic style, where the duo chooses to learn from tired tropes of skit shows past and improve upon it. In order to re-introduce characters, they don’t make a skit around the character; rather, they
Make sure the sketch is funny first as opposed to trusting that a character is so beloved that we’re gonna skate by on the popularity of the character rather than the comedy. It’s always starts with a funny sketch.
Based on that mentality of letting the skit come naturally and the characters following rather than trying to put a square peg into a round hole, it makes sense that Key and Peele don’t bring back some of the hip hop characters from Seasons 1 and 2. Instead, we see one hip hop skit, “Rap Battle Hype Man,” which was based off of a real life viral video of a hype man. In the skit, Key is a rapper engaging in a rap battle, and Peele is acting as his hype man, wearing a hat with the tag still on, like a reference to their past skit “Dueling Hats.” At first, Peele acts relatively normal, giving a few grunts and shouts, but he quickly escalates to a continuous screech that completely prevents the battle from continuing. Despite Key’s requests for Peele to calm down, Peele continues his antics and becomes physical, forcing Key to forfeit the battle. A change in scenery occurs, and Key and Peele are sitting at sunset on the bank of a serene, beautiful lake. Key says,
I want you to imagine a place, man, where you and I can go and do our thing, but never have to forfeit. You can scream and shout and shove people around, but we don’t ever have to quit.
After his inspirational speech, he shoots Peele in the head. It’s a clear reference to Of Mice and Men that one really wouldn’t expect from a hip hop sketch.
What begins as a reference to a superficial viral video turns into an allusory referral to a canonical novel. Key and Peele are expanding past the safe, easy comedy of The Nest. However, risk is inherently risky. Their decision to kill off Peele seems to be in bad taste. Yes, it provides shock value and can be seen as funny, but it’s also incredibly disrespectful to the person from whom the sketch is based. Regardless of my opinion, Key and Peele are clearly expanding their repertoire and pushing boundaries of their comedy.
This can be further exemplified through “Negrotown,” a non-hip hop skit that came out in the off-season between Season 4 and Season 5, just a few weeks following the death of Freddie Gray and during the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore. Negrotown itself is “a black utopia,” where “you can walk on the street without getting stopped, harassed, or beat.”
Key was being arrested by a white officer, when he banged his head getting into the police car, and Peele comes out and brings Key into Negrotown. The skit itself is abundant with social commentary: “you can wear your hoodie and not get shot,” a clear reference to the shooting of Trayvon Martin; “your loan application can’t get turned down,” regarding redlining, an issue which still somehow plagues America in its efforts to continually gentrify every single urban community; “no stupid-ass white folk stealing your culture, claiming it’s theirs,” concerning the rampant cultural appropriation of black Americans through music, language, hair, or people like Rachel Dolezal and Victoria Waldrip who claim they’re black.
The skit ends with Key waking up, and the officer telling him he still is going to Negrotown. Negrotown is indeed real — it’s prison. This skit acts as the culmination of 4 seasons of sociopolitical commentary from Key and Peele; it is the perfect combination of biting, socially relevant humor with a twisted ending.
STAGE 3: COMING HOME
Season 5 is Key and Peele’s homecoming, their victory lap. With it, we see a return to their roots — hip hop. Season 5 Episode 3 holds the first hip hop sketch of the final season — “Old Timers Talk Drake.” This skit doesn’t hold an underlying political agenda like so many of the others that we’ve looked at. Instead, it’s just a story based on their experience shooting Fargo, when a young man approached them and said “you guys like [mumbling, so it sounds like ‘drink’] Drake?” That’s exactly the premise of the skit; a young man approaches two older guys(Key and Peele) and says that verbatim. The older men proceed to lament their age in a rhyming fashion.
The classic Key and Peele twist, however, occurs in the end where an even older pair of men come to the bar, and Key and Peele say “you guys like Drake?” hoping to catch them in their old age. The men, however, are well-versed in Drake and begin singing along.
Perhaps the most well-known rap skit from Key and Peele, “Rap Album Confessions,” premiers also in Season 5 coinciding with the release of Straight Outta Compton, the biographical film of N.W.A. The skit shows Key as a detective trying to convict Gun Rack(Peele) of killing a Darnell Simmons, because Gun Rack just released an album called I Killed Darnell Simmons with lyrics that clearly incriminate him, but Rack says “it’s just a concept album,” so it doesn’t count as a real confession. The piece is meant to poke fun at the braggadocious nature of rap that glorifies and hyperbolizes violent crime. This harks back to literally Season 1 Episode 1 with the Lil Wayne skit that also shows the cocky nature of rappers.
Finally, towards the end of the last season comes the final hip hop sketch: “Outkast Reunion.” It’s a simple skit that pokes fun at the relationship between Big Boi(Peele) and Andre 3000(Key) of Outkast. Andre 3000 is depicted wearing an outfit similar to the “Hey Ya” video and as the hyper-flamboyant, excitable, eccentric character who orders an absurdly ornate coffee, while Big Boi is shown to be very lowkey wearing a very neutral, normal outfit.
Andre seems to be constantly annoying to Big Boi because of his antics like blowing a pinwheel when Big Boi is asking legitimate questions. Responding to the skit, the actual Big Boi said, “that shit was funny as hell,” not because it was so accurate, but because “it was way off … [Andre 3000 and I] have been hanging out every week.” The skits of Key and Peele aren’t always accurate. They’re never going to be precise, correct parodies of situations; Key and Peele’s humor is based in hyperbole and exaggeration from MAD TV, from Season 1, all the way until now.
Season 5 is meant to be a return voyage back home, back to the nest. Their base comedy isn’t in the recurring segments and characters of Seasons 3 and 4; it’s in hip hop comedy. That’s why you don’t see any of the characters in hip hop return. Despite their biraciality, both Key and Peele have strong roots in hip hop, because it’s where they were raised. It’s their playground, where they can talk about whatever they want, whether that be inane topics like the eccentricity of Andre 3000 or poignant, socially aware issues like homelessness, in a manner that’s completely comfortable for Key and Peele. Despite all that they’ve done and all that they’ve grown in the 5 seasons of Key and Peele, they always return back to their first love, hip hop.
