March 31, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Country Music

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21^st century humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

On what a silly sketch helps us see about country music’s frustrating evolution, and how history counters those trends.

Compared to the multi-layered genius of “Negrotown” and the political savvy and influence of Luther the Anger Translator, Key & Peele’s 2018 sketch “Country Music” is a bit more straightforward, an example of their impressive ability to take a somewhat familiar but funny comic premise and extend it to unexpected levels of silliness in just a few minutes. The heart of this particular sketch, as of many of theirs, is thus the two men’s delightful comic performances and the way they bounce off each other, in this case featuring Key as a country music devotee who only belatedly realizes the racist undercurrents of the songs he loves, and Peele as his new neighbor whose frustrations with Key’s color blindness (so to speak) help produce that belated epiphany.

But I wouldn’t be spending an entire week’s series on Key & Peele if the duo’s more straightforward comic sketches couldn’t likewise help us think about aspects of our culture and society. In the case of “Country Music,” the sketch’s hyperbolic silliness allows us to examine the only somewhat less obvious ways that the genre has in recent decades featured racist imagery and tropes. Take for example mega-superstar Garth Brooks’ 1993 hit “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association,” which builds on Reagan-era narratives about social programs and their recipients, contrasting the hard-working constituents of its titular organization with “all of those/Standing in a welfare line.” Or take for another example the names of the popular late 1990s and early 2000s bands the Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum, both of which tap into histories of Southern white supremacy (and both of which were as a result changed in the midst of 2020’s reckonings with race and memory).

So yeah, late 20^th and early 21^st century country music has a problem with race (or several problems). But as that hyperlinked article reflects, and as I highlighted in this 2019 year in review post on Lil Nas X’s smash country crossover hit “Old Town Road” (2019), the genre’s actual history is far more cross-cultural than those racist undertones illustrate, featuring foundational African American artists who have influenced the current collection of diverse artists and voices. Seen in that light, perhaps the most telling moment in Key & Peele’s sketch is the early exchange when Peele’s character is so surprised that Key’s character is a fan of country music, a reflection (whether intentional in their writing of the sketch or accidental) of just how under-remembered both these histories and these contemporary legacies of African American country music remain.

Next sketch tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humor favorites you’d share?

March 30, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Luther

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21^st century humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

On one of the smartest comic ideas ever, and the stunning political moment it produced.

There’s no way to know for sure how particular cultural works will be remembered or what their ultimate influences and legacies will be, but if I were a betting man, I would wager that it is the character of Luther, President Barack Obama’s Anger Translator, who will represent the most enduring legacy of Key & Peele. Besides featuring Jordan Peele’s pitch-perfect impression of Obama and Keegan-Michael Key’s inspired creation of Luther, two fantastic comic performances that worked even better in combination and conversation with each other, the recurring Luther sketches tapped into both specific critiques of Obama (as too professorial, too calm, and the like) and broader cultural tropes such as the stereotype of the “angry black man” (and woman). They also made the show topical and responsive to current events in a way that it’s often difficult for scripted work to be, while (I can testify, having watched more than a few before starting this post) holding up very well over time.

All of that would be more than enough to make Luther both a wonderful comic character and a groundbreaking series of sketches, but then came the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. President Obama did a wonderful job at every one of his eight WHCDs, displaying both a capacity for self-effacement and a biting wit that themselves belied those narratives of his overly professorial or formal tone (and that stand in stark contrast to the most recent occupant, whose total lack of a sense of humor or capacity for self-reflection of any kind was on full display in his decision never to attend a single one of the WHCDs during his term). But it was in 2015, at his penultimate WHCD performance, that Obama brought out Luther to serve as his own Anger Translator, in an inspired bit that impressively demonstrated those qualities of Obama’s, took full advantage of the character’s voice and perspective, and, most importantly, yielded one of the single most stunning and significant political moments in recent years.

That moment was the culmination of the bit, the final minute or so of the hyperlinked video in the last paragraph. As Obama turns his attention to the issue of climate change, he begins to grow more heated in his own remarks, with Luther attempting to calm him down so he can do his complementary job as Anger Translator. But Obama rightly cannot be calmed, and the dialogue builds to this exchange: Obama: “The Pentagon calls it a national security emergency, Miami floods on a sunny day, and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate.” Luther: “Okay, okay, Mr. President, I think they got it bro.” Obama: “It is crazy. What about our kids? What kind of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible bull—” and Luther interrupts him to tell him that he doesn’t need an Anger Translator, he needs counseling (before fleeing in fear, and telling Michelle that “he’s crazy”). The moment is very funny, but it’s also profoundly telling, a perfect way to reflect the fact that the urgency of climate change demands righteous anger from every one of us (including the famously calm president). All thanks to the wonderful character of Luther the Anger Translator.

Next sketch tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humor favorites you’d share?

March 29, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Negrotown

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21^st century humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

On three layers to one of the truly great comedy sketches of all time.

I had seen and enjoyed various clips from Key & Peele by the time “Negrotown” aired in May 2015 (as a promo for the show’s next season), but it was this sketch which truly convinced me that the pair were American comic geniuses. For one thing, they manage in the course of the brief musical number at the sketch’s center to feature more different racial, cultural, and social issues than many full-length works are able to include, and to do so in a catchy, rhyming song (with a fantastic accompanying dance number) at that. From Redd Foxx to Dick Gregory to Richard Pryor to Whoopi Goldberg to Eddie Murphy to Chris Rock to the Original Kings of Comedy to Dave Chappelle to Wanda Sykes to Tiffany Haddish to so many more, African American comedians have long been at the forefront of our collective conversations on race in America, but I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a more succinct and thoughtful (and entertaining) comic engagement with those topics than “Negrotown.”

At the same time, I don’t think the sketch’s use of a musical number is at all accidental or secondary to its ideas. From its set and costumes and colors to the very tint of the film (I’m sure that’s not the technical term, but you know what I mean), that musical number feels very much like it’s been lifted out of a Rodgers & Hammerstein show—except that the America portrayed in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musicals was all too often quite literally the opposite of Negrotown, a nation and world that seemed to be entirely devoid of African Americans. Moreover, while individual shows like the groundbreaking DuBose Heyward and George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess (1935) did feature African American characters and stories, the overarching history of American musicals was a strikingly whitewashed one until the last couple decades. At the very least, “Negrotown” highlights that legacy by creating an African American-centric musical number and world (which really shouldn’t feel as unfamiliar as it does); but in an implicit way that element becomes yet another racial and cultural commentary in this multi-layered sketch.

And then there’s the sketch’s framing story. Its portrayal of an African American man randomly and frustratingly targeted by a racist white cop has only become more resonant in the nearly 6 years since the sketch first aired, of course. And to my mind, the sketch’s single best line, and perhaps the single best line in any 21^st century comic work, is the final twist, as the racist cop manhandles the innocent man into his police cruiser: “I thought I was going to Negrotown,” the man complains; to which the cop replies, “Oh, you are.” I’ve spent many years thinking about the evolving histories and issues of race and mass incarceration, as well as reading and teaching the vital work of folks like Michelle Alexander on those questions; and then along comes this talented comic duo to express all that in one pitch-perfect line and moment.

Next sketch tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humor favorites you’d share?