thread of loving key and peele

it is grotesquely unfair that Britain got Lucas/Walliams and America got Key/Peele

*grotesquely*

Limmy will have to do

that sketch this week about the "wise old dude" was A+

these guys are both funny and this show has some inspired stuff occasionally but man…they can peddle some hacky shit, this season especially. i mean bits about people who keep pressing the elevator button and women-who can understand them! jokes, come on comedy pros. and the fuckin jokes about sports…plus they have this super eager to please musical theatre major vibe that makes the pandering to the coveted bro-y Men's Health subscriber demo especially unpalatable to me. like they don't really dig that material but hey we have ad time to sell, times are tough. i mean in the last episode i watched that sketch with the gay guy, the feminist, and the black power guy being constantly offended by the befuddled white guy was like some shit that rush limbaugh would write for the 1/2 hour news hour.
also the gay panic/it's funny that these dudes are saying gay things sketches have started to feel really lol ew gross gays homophobic to me. comforting the comfortable. i dunno, it's a fine line when you traffic in dick jokes.

yeah, show is really funny sometimes, but it's really buckling under the strain of 15 hours of scripted television in which 2 guys explore the same handful of topics/premises over and over

it's been a much weaker season this go round as they've been fighting to figure out how to turn characters into franchises, yes.

i'm ok if they keep cranking out faux-80s videos

Mattress of Solitude

was the best joke this season

pretty much every sketch they've done about sports has been great. the one about excessive celebration was hilarious. they just nail so many of the little things which helps when most of your sketches only have one or two central jokes.

the over-celebration one was really good

I was crying at that one, it was just immaculate

also loved that they repurposed a couple of the East/West players for it

I liked the flopping one

have we talked about how amazing the Halloween episode was?

That might have been their best one ever. They should really do more themed episodes.

oh actually I guess we did, forgot about the extended discussion of the Shining sketch

This season has been pretty good so far. Some of the really far out or bizarre sketches are incredible. The ending twist on the "Cat Poster" was one of those "holy shit, this is brilliant" moments that so few sketch comedy shows have these days

it put a nice bow on the whole thing but i'd hardly call it a brilliant twist

i just wish they hadn't flashed back through earlier parts of the sketch to drive the joke home. i just thought it was brilliant because it was one of those sort of reversal-of-fortune twist endings that happens to make no sense whatsoever

the cat poster sketch was one of the ones that made me think 'damn they're really running on fumes here' like one of them had this idea for a usual suspects skit that they've had in a notebook since 1996 and madtv never went for it and its like finally the ball is in my court, comedy world

i loved the cat poster sketch. usual suspects parodies in 2013 rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efiW2K8gASM

so good

last couple of eps have been a major downer for me as either reused skits and characters take center stage or the skits just fail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3h6es6zh1c
as always, don't read the comments

when someone brought up to me "man, they, do a lot of gay jokes, don't they?" i was ignoring it for a while, but...

the ending of the skit above where flamboyant gay man says "oh i'm not persecuted, I'm just an asshole" and then exaggeratedly licks a massive candy schlong is not particularly defensible

I'm on board with these guys in general but there is something a little off, like they rely too heavily on certain tropes/approaches in a way that seems basically conservative - a midway point between Mr. Show and Dave Chapelle without ever going quite as far as either.

where did these guys come from? were they doing their own individual things (standup, improv etc) prior to this? they seem to have come out of nowhere

mad tv i thought?

re: production quality - http://www.studiodaily.com/2013/12/getting-the-many-looks-of-key-and-peele/

last couple of eps have been a major downer for me as either reused skits and characters take center stage or the skits just fail

every episode so far has had one sketch that I absolutely love but I can definitely agree with this. lately it seems like a lot of these sketches are just vehicles for odd one-liners.

The best skit show going (damning with faint praise I know). I like it better than Chapelle's Show (which had a lot of weak bits,) way better than "Whitest Kids" and miles better than those new dudes Bob Odenkirk sponsors. They can get just as weird as Tim & Eric and their acolytes but with the added benefit of actually being funny.

agreed

yeah I find it funny that a lot of the online ads for it emphasize "hey, this is on TV, you don't have to just watch it on Youtube", even though it really is the perfect show for Youtube viewing, since a lot of these sketches are well worth watching multiple times and I don't think they've done an episode of all good ones yet (in my opinion of course)

they're probably getting a minuscule amount of money from YouTube ads... but this is honestly one of the few sketch shows out there that has a > 50% hit rate on their half hours, for the most part, difficult enough task as it is

kinda reminds me of Big Train (at least the first season), which was 25% absolutely hilarious, 50% interesting (if not laugh-out-loud funny), and 25% total dud

where K&P excel is that even if you don't really like the joke, there's something else to appreciate. the one where they're two jazz musicians constantly trying to one-up each other (or the funk band that was just spouting nonsense about garbage and food) weren't necessarily all that funny to me but they were shot and acted out so well that I really enjoyed them anyway.

^thanks for the tip on the jazz duel, i had not seen that one and i love it deeply.

speaking of this one is really funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiA4blvQPQ

pussy on the chainwax redeemed by the too emotional zag when i assumed a zig was coming and the "coming to a conversation near you" graphic because i feel fairly certain i am gonna hear someone say that shortly.

dog park skit was perfect, really hit all the dog park marks

yeah, i agree

ok i keep thinking about "potato, potato" and losing my shit.

this is probably the most lean, polished sketch show that has ever existed

otm

like the more i watch this, the more i realize that these two guys have more sketch chops than anyone working today outside of kate mckinnon. the fact that they can both be on the same show is kind of unbelievable.

props of course to these dudes but i wonder how much of this is due to being able to do pre-recorded segments with production standards that would've been insanely cost-prohibitive even five years ago. say what you will about the lonely island dudes, they afaik were the first to really do the whole high-end production w/low-brow humor thing.

part of what makes so many of their skits work is that they are on-location and not on chintzy soundstages. and not playing to a studio audience tamps down the tendency to go super broad and lowest common denominator.

the continental breakfast sketch plays out in my head more or less every time I eat breakfast in this hotel :D

i wanna eat a banana sideways

first S4 sketch came out yesterday and it's hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWO1pkHgrBM

nearly 400k views in less than 24 hours. amazing

really psyched for this

with october approaching, I am having very fond memories of their halloween episode