TAGGED AS: Set visit
It’s late morning at an old-school family restaurant in the San Fernando Valley and Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key sit in directors chairs waiting for the crew to set up the next shot of their award-winning Comedy Central show Key & Peele. There’s nothing too out of the ordinary in the conversation — one which centers around Key making a passionate case for reading the Game of Thrones books while Peele and I argue that watching the show is sufficient — except for the fact that they both look positively ridiculous. Styled beyond recognition with costumes, wigs, and makeup to look like Italian gangsters, Key and Peele carry on comfortably in their get-ups — which I can only temporarily ignore. And then it hits me again; they look positively ridiculous.
Key and Peele are accustomed to an environment where hilarity is the norm. Four seasons in, they continue to make seriousness silly and take silliness seriously. Constantly upping the ante — not only in terms of production, but also in terms of making each other laugh — the comedy duo strives to stay true to what audiences expect while keeping the show fresh for themselves. And all of this requires way more work and energy than you could ever imagine, which is just one of the many things I learned during my set visit to Key & Peele.
So many sketches are killed before the show gets into pre-production. This season, the team wrote over 500 sketches and shot only 120 of them. Some are cut because they’re too close to other ones they’ve done. For season four, Key & Peele is working harder than ever to be original — even if it means sacrificing something funny. Other times, a sketch that seems like a great idea might not get enough laughs by the live audience (which serves as a last-minute focus group) and those have to go too.
2. The sketches you do see are tweaked until the last minute.
“Even in the editing room, you’ll be like, “Oh my God, this really isn’t working the way we thought it would. What are we going to do to fix it? Can we add voiceover? Do we completely recut it?'” showrunner Jay Martel explained. The team tinkers with the sketches right up until they have to go into sound editing. And sometimes a last-minute addition becomes one of the highlights of the sketch. For instance, in the “East-West College Bowl” sketch, the headshots of the athletes making goofy faces were added in the final edit to give the players more personality, a detail that ended up being one of the audience’s favorite parts of the bit.
Once the shooting is done and the producers hit the editing room, ordering the sketches becomes the main priority. “Everyone weighs in with like, ‘No, this sketch is better than that sketch’ or we’ll agree, ‘This is a great sketch; it has to be in the front,'” director Peter Atencio told Rotten Tomatoes. “It’s something we all obsess over and it definitely feels like the show is meant to be viewed as a 22-minute whole more so than sliced up into little chunks. You can still enjoy a sketch but we do try to have a pacing to an episode that is rewarding to watch.” Still, he and Martel understand that their audience is mostly discovering the show online. “Our show will always be like the pupu platter at the binge-watching buffet,” Martel said.
4. It’s hard to know what will work with audiences, but it’s getting easier.
For Jordan Peele, he still never knows what’s going to hit. “Sometimes the most well-crafted, purposeful sketch can make people like, ‘Yeah, cool,’ but something that’s simple and stupid where we’re just goofing off and having fun really resonates with the audience,” Peele said. “After a few seasons, I almost feel like I no longer know what’s really going to be the audience faves.” But the sketches that always work are the ones that make Key and Peele break into laughter themselves during shooting. “We kind of implicitly dare each other to not break, but the number-one rule is to make the other guy laugh,” Key said. “It’s all about machismo; it’s about male pride.” The other barometer is whether or not the crew is laughing. They know that if the crew likes it, the audience at home is going to like it.
Season four will resurface some popular characters from past years, but it doesn’t work the way you might think. Rather than bring a character to the writers’ room and brainstorm new ideas for him (or her), it’s often the case that writers will have an idea for a sketch and then Peele or Key reverse-engineer one of their characters into that particular scenario. “The guys might go, ‘This is a funny relationship sketch, but it would make a really funny Wendell sketch.'” Atencio explained.
6. Current affairs are opened out to bigger themes for a longer shelf life.
It’s not that Key & Peele doesn’t do topical humor; it just takes what’s happening in pop culture and tries to pinpoint why it matters — and that becomes the basis for a sketch. “When something happens in the news, like the Sterling thing, we have to ask ourselves what it’s really about and try to write a sketch about that,” Martel said. For instance, the Obama-Luther sketches are evergreen because they make fun of Obama’s reticence rather than something he does in any given week. “The writers have done an amazing job finding something comedic in the culture and bringing it back to something that is more universal,” Atencio explained. “If we root a sketch in pop culture in terms of the look or the genre, there is usually a deeper core theme that will live longer.”
Key’s favorite sketches are the ones in which both characters share the same rabid point of view. They call these ‘two peas in a pod’ sketches, such as the vignettes with Karim and Jahar, Obama and Luther, and the two valets (by the way, the valets have names: Majid and Duke). “It allows us to go back to our roots a little bit more, which are improvisation and the theater,” Key said. Key and Peele have a ‘no winking allowed’ policy, which means they can never step out of a comedy bit to acknowledge that they’re, in fact, playing characters.
8. The show lets the production values do the heavy lifting.
One of the benefits of Key & Peele‘s cinematic approach to sketch comedy is that it covers a lot of the exposition without the characters having to explain what you’re walking into. During his first meeting with Key and Peele, Atencio’s pitch was that he wanted to do sketches that felt like the funniest set-piece of a 90-minute movie so you could imagine the characters going on and living their lives after the scene was over. Production values are higher than ever in season four. Key and Peele came out of the gate with their “Alien Imposters” sketch and the live audience wrap-arounds have been replaced with a True Detective interstitial parody.
Producing sketch comedy that with the quality of a movie requires a lot more time than a show like Saturday Night Live. A three-minute bit can take days, though you would never know it judging by Key and Peele’s energy level on air. In the upcoming “Aerobics Meltdown” sketch, Key and Peele had to do aerobics for eight hours in one day. How do they keep their energy up? By goofing around on set. “You have to find time to do that,” Key said. “There are some people who think, ‘You can’t do that; we have to be efficient,’ but you can’t be efficient without goodwill and good energy.”
10. The dumbest ideas sometimes get the most consideration.
When Key and Peele commit to an idea, they commit to an idea. “We have really serious arguments about things that if someone from the outside world would just walk in, they’d think we’re all insane,” Martel said. For the sketch “If Names Were Farts,” Martel, Atencio, Key, and Peele spent hours arguing over what the “names” should sound like. “The scene happened at a cocktail party, so these names were coming up again and again and you’re like, “No, that fart’s different. That’s not his name”” Martel said.
“The biggest asset to the show is obviously Keegan and Jordan,” Martel said. “Because they’re biracial and because they’re so smart and funny, they’re able encompass a lot of areas that I wouldn’t be able to touch on another sketch show.” No matter what the premise, Key and Peele’s objective is play to their unique qualities. As Key explained to Rotten Tomatoes, “Something that Jordan has always mentioned from day one is ‘let’s do something that only we can do.'” The ability to identify what makes each actor special translates to the writing and keeps the show feeling original.
12. The show keeps evolving from season to season.
The writers on Key & Peele have a desire to try new things constantly. It’s not something they speak to directly in the writers’ room, but they all have an inclination to keep things evolving. “You get to the end of the season, and you stand back and go, ‘Oh! It’s a little different this time!'” Atencio said. “It’s nice because it keeps us from feeling like we’re just grinding out the same thing all the time. I don’t think the show could survive if we did that.”
Season four of Key & Peele airs Wednesday nights at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.
