KEY AND PEELE (2014)
Whenever I sit down with Key and Peele—which is fairly often, and we’re usually talking about a screenplay we’re working on together, and who knows if we’ll ever finish it—I think: I wish I had a Key or a Peele in my life. The only two people I’ve seen who seem as close in their friendship and sensibility are Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I mean, where’s my Peele? Where’s my Key? Why the hell am I sitting alone in this room?
Anyway, these guys are hilarious and, maybe more important, they seem to be having the best time in their work, and with the fact that they get to do it together. They are funny and sharp on all subjects, but I can’t think of anybody who has been better on the subject of race in America. They have found that magic formula of making people laugh until they shit themselves while also saying things that need to be said right now.
Judd Apatow: So you’ve just finished shooting the show, and you did two seasons at once?
Keegan-Michael Key: Yeah, pretty much.
Judd: That’s crazy. Was it a nightmare? Two-thirds of the way in, did you go, “This is a terrible decision,” or did you not hit that level of suffering?
Key: Some things fell through the cracks. We’d be on set, trying to fix things, but then we’d have a hiatus week, and then we’d have to shoot something for Comedy Central on the hiatus week, but while that’s happening there’s always still a stream of emails that come through saying, “Here’s the second version of this cut, of this episode,” or, “Do you guys want to give notes on this?” And there’s just no time to weigh in on all that stuff.
Jordan Peele: No, at some point you’ve just got to go—
Key: Yeah, you’ve got to delegate. Trust people and delegate.
Judd: Do you have people that you could trust with a full episode? Could you say, “I’m so burned out, I am not even going to watch this one,” and have faith that it’s going to be solid?
Key: Yeah. I’ve watched episodes on TV with my wife at night and I’ll see little cuts of things and go, “Oh, that was a nice little touch.”
Peele: There was an episode where an old edit got used by accident, though.
Key: Oh, shit. That’s true.
Peele: Something got by and I didn’t…I was so pissed. They’re fixing it now for all the future airings and stuff, but I couldn’t blame anybody because I didn’t screen it.
Judd: Yeah, you remember those things forever. What level of control freak are you guys at?
Peele: I feel like, in the beginning, I wanted to be part of every single stage of the process. There was a fear that it wouldn’t go right. When I was at MADtv, it was crazy. I felt like I was putting good work in and then it would somehow get corrupted: Some edit would get made or a sketch I wrote that I thought was genius wouldn’t get picked. That whole mentality made me a real control freak. But you know, like we were saying, this time we had no choice but to let go of the reins a little.
Key: I’m—to my detriment—a very trusting Pollyanna, and that can lead to times when a piece of work suffers, so I try to be a little bit more of a control freak. But my thing is—and this is not necessarily the best process—but, once we get on set, I know Jordan and I can fix anything. We can fix anything on set.
Judd: In the writing?
Key: Yeah, the writing, but even in the performance.
Peele: With this double season, when they requested twenty-one episodes, I think our first response was, like, We’re going to kill ourselves. We’re going to kill ourselves working this hard. One fear we had—and we had a serious discussion about this—was that we’ve been designing the whole process of this show so we kind of can’t fail, but all of a sudden we’re doing twice as many episodes. And one little dip in quality at this point is, I think, a legacy-affecting dip. Same thing if we get better. Plateauing, we’re okay with, but it’s not great. So that was the big thing: What is the show going to do? Dip, plateau, or get better? And I still can’t tell what it is.
Judd: During the last season of Kids in the Hall, it felt like they had so burned through their ideas that they went to some other crazy, absurd level. It was definitely hit-and-miss, but there were things in it that were so insanely funny—things you could only have written if you were burned out.
Key: Right, exactly. And to be honest with you, I actually think the second half of our fourth season, we will not plateau. I believe that it’s going to be better. Because when you’ve been working with someone for eleven years, you get to a place where there’s going to be something only you can do. Like Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. They’re at a place where only they can do something that way, and I feel like we have things only we can do, and so it will excel and it will grow. It will grow.
Judd: It must be a big trial by fire for you guys, as friends, to be under that much pressure. Especially with this season getting so much positive attention, and you guys being on the cover of Time magazine and everything. That’s a lot to have on your plate at once.
Key: It’s been interesting. There are fellow writers who were early adopters of the show, people who have been on board since day one. But more interesting to me are the regular people, who don’t have anything to do with our industry, who have gotten on board. I want to meet those people. I think a lot of those late adopters are probably biracial like us and said, Oh my gosh, here is a show for me. That’s why the quality has to stay up, because you’ve got new people watching the show now. It’s like a series of tidal waves—and in the midst of it, you keep walking up to podiums and receiving awards and just going, “Thanks,” and then: “Oh, I’ve got to get back to the office now.”
Peele: It is weird, but all the cool accolades have really beaten the enormous paychecks in coming to us.
Judd: Right. You’re not making as much money as your accolades would suggest, and eventually, you just get pissed at everyone.
Key: Just steaming, staring at your Peabody Award, like, Those fuckers. This system is not working.
Judd: Cosby’s made so much more money than we have. And it makes the accolades feel like some kind of weird accident. But I think the next couple of years, it will continue to sink in. Like: Oh, this was a crazy time for us.
Judd: What really sticks out?
Key: The Peabody Award, don’t you think?
Judd: That’s a great award. Your program shows that prejudices and the way people were and are ignorant are ridiculous and should be mocked. Like my daughter, she’s mad that we even have to talk about homophobia because she doesn’t understand how anyone would feel that way. She actually gets upset. But that’s because her generation grew up saying homophobia is stupid, racism is stupid, and so it’s not even in their heads. I think comedy has helped affect that. Do you get that sense?
Peele: Our target demo was teenagers, and so we were forced to make a show that was relevant to them. A lot of the work we did in that first season was really about: What is this show? Every sketch we chose had to help us define what the whole point of this thing was. We are doing sketches that could only be done today, things that wouldn’t have been relevant several years ago. It’s like what you’re saying: Racism still exists, and it’s ridiculous, but there are still parts of the country where the youth have just a completely different view of race, and we want to bring that conversation into the larger culture.