Key: That’s really the biggest, most significant paradigm shift: Kids don’t look at race, they look at culture. I don’t think they know that they’re looking at culture, but they’re co-opting each other’s culture and it’s starting to mush together, whereas for me or for someone older than me, everything was always about the color of your skin.
Judd: But now it seems like it is a little bit more about class?
Key: It does. And when I say culture, I mean class. As in, you can afford to be part of a certain culture. For a lot of people, their culture is defined by where they are socioeconomically, and for decades, rich kids have coopted poorer kids’ cultures because they were bored or whatever.
Judd: My daughter is at this nice private school, but there are a lot of scholarship students there, too. She says that the school is very aggressive about wanting everyone to hang out with each other. And when they don’t, they assume it’s because of race, but she says it’s because of class, that it’s uncomfortable for the kids who aren’t living at the same economic level to integrate. And that kids from similar class backgrounds tend to hang out together.
Key: Yeah. My wife and I drove out to Riverside yesterday to watch my best friend’s oldest son play for his Pop Warner football team. They lost the game by a field goal, and it was a heartbreaker. My friend is from Rancho Palos Verdes and all the kids on the other team were from San Bernardino, and as we were driving home, my wife said, “Well, those kids really need it. Good for them.” And I feel that all the way. You know, I’m from Detroit. It doesn’t matter when New York City wins a sports championship. But when Detroit wins a sports championship, it actually means something. We need the money for infrastructure, we need the boost. This is the same thing. The majority of those kids were African American, and they’re from some really bad, downtrodden school district in the Mount Baldy area. It’s different than kids from Rancho Palos Verdes. And they’re out there, screaming and running around the field and jumping up and down. It means something for them.
Judd: I think it means so much whenever you see somebody that you relate to in whatever way kicking ass and succeeding. I’m so interested in this with the president, and how people look at him.
Key: Yeah, and trying to figure out what box to put him in. You have to understand that if you’re going to put him in a box, you should put him in the child-of-a-single-mother, lower-middle-class box. That’s the box he belongs in. You know, as Jordan has said in the past, I sometimes think we have a show because Obama got elected. That pushed these issues to the forefront, and people have had to address it. What happens when a person’s mixed?
Judd: The country’s completely mixed, but you still see the last vestiges of some things—
Peele: There’s such a diversity of experiences, and having a sketch show now has been a great way to explore it all, because there’s no single comment to be made that’s going to sum it up. Often we’ll make a sketch and go, “You know what? You know who’s going to love this sketch? Hispanic break dancers are going to love it.” And then this one, “This one is for the black people in Ferguson that need this story told as a reminder to everyone else.”
Key: Right, that this is going on, and that we know that’s going on, and that everybody else needs to know that that’s still going on. Whenever people stop to talk to me on the street, I’m always like, “I’m sorry, I’m so curious, you’re going to have to tell me what sketch hooked you in. I want to know what demographic you’re coming from.”
Peele: In the beginning, we really latched on to being biracial as something that made us similar to the president, but also as the thing that made us relevant and hadn’t been explored. As the show has gone on and progressed, though, the more important thing is that we’re able to tell the stories of anybody. We can get away with going anywhere because we’ve gone everywhere.
Key: This is so lofty, but it feels like we ended up writing an American show.
Judd: Absolutely. And not just where America is now; it’s also where America’s going.
Peele: Part of the interesting thing about this whole conversation is the fact that I think we consider ourselves kind of like modern-day jesters. Our job is to be a mirror for everything that’s going on, and I think that if people had the sense that we were just purely in the president’s pocket or whatever, we’d lose credibility.
Judd: I love that your comedy doesn’t seem to come from insecurity or self-hatred. I could be completely wrong—you may hate yourselves—but my sense of humor came from feeling like I was not like all these other people and it sucked. It made me mad at the world. But I don’t get the sense that you guys came from the same type of emotional experience. What was the thing that made you funny?
Peele: I think we both had success early on that probably helped us not have a disgruntled vibe. But I think our ability to be chameleons comes from an early sense of identity crisis.
Key: I agree. That was our survival mechanism.
Peele: Keegan grew up in Detroit and I grew up in New York, both fairly cosmopolitan places. But we both still lived in a culture where being a black person who sounds white is a recipe for a beating.
Key: I mean, if you go way back—primordial, right—as human beings, we have had to categorize things to stay alive. Eat the brown one, don’t eat the green one. So some of that primal stuff kicks in for people and they go, You’re not fitting in my box. And that’s why you get beaten up, because you scare them and they just happen to be bigger than you and know how to throw a football. But I think for me, humor is definitely borne of the insecurity in being adopted and being biracial and saying, “I just got to figure out what the gig is that will allow me to feel good emotionally and survive the beatings.”
Peele: You know, the beauty of a show like Freaks and Geeks is that anybody who is left to create their own identity because they don’t fit into the “cool” ones, or the ones that are already in place, can get working on this creative business early. All the main characters on Freaks and Geeks would be wildly successful today.
Judd: Yes, they would. The ones that aren’t in jail.
Key: Something that has always been positive for me, in our working experience, is that we’re trying to figure out that puzzle in different ways. My mom had to keep nudging me and nudging me until she finally kicked me out between the curtains and onto the stage, you know: “That’s where you belong!” I was painfully shy in grade school. I was the most well-spoken kid and experienced the most emotion and I was mesmerized by all the school plays—Annie, and Godspell—but my brain said, You can’t do that. Why would you think you could do that?
Judd: Who told you you couldn’t do it?
Key: Nobody. This is my pop psychology theory: I had a complete, profound, horrible sense of self because, even as a nine-year-old, you can comprehend the idea of, Why would a woman have a baby and then give the baby away? Why would you do that? There must be something wrong with me. So I could sense how amazing it would make me feel if I got out onstage, but I wasn’t allowed to do it because there’s clearly something wrong with me. But my mom kept on pushing. She was pushing so hard, like, “This is where you belong. You just need the confidence to know that it’s going to be okay.”