{"id":40013,"date":"2015-02-17T01:55:04","date_gmt":"2015-02-17T01:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=40013"},"modified":"2015-02-17T02:13:30","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T02:13:30","slug":"brother-from-another-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=40013","title":{"rendered":"Brother from Another Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brother from Another Mother<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2015-02-23<\/p>\n

Zadie Smith<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Key and Peele\u2019s chameleon comedy.<\/em><\/p>\n

The wigs on \u201cKey and Peele<\/a>\u201d are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business. Individually made, using pots of hair clearly labelled\u2014\u201cShort Black\/Brown, Human,\u201d \u201cLong Black, Human\u201d\u2014they are destined for the heads of a dazzling array of characters: old white sportscasters and young Arab gym posers; rival Albanian\/Macedonian restaurateurs; a couple of trash-talking, churchgoing, African-American ladies; and the President of the United States, to name a few. Between them, Keegan-Michael Key<\/a> and Jordan Peele<\/a> play all of these people, and more, on their hit Comedy Central<\/a> sketch show, now in its fourth season. (They are also the show\u2019s main writers and executive producers.) They eschew the haphazard whatever\u2019s-in-the-costume-box approach\u2014enshrined by Monty Python<\/a> and still operating on \u201cSaturday Night Live<\/a>\u201d\u2014in favor of a sleek, cinematic style. There are no fudged lines, crimes against drag, wobbling sets, or corpsing. False mustaches do not hang limply: a strain of yak hair lends them body and shape. Editing is a three-month process, if not longer. Subjects are satirized by way of precise imitation\u2014you laugh harder because it looks like the real thing. On one occasion, a black actress, a guest star on the show, followed Key into his trailer, convinced that his wig was his actual hair. (Key\u2014to steal a phrase from Nabokov<\/a>\u2014is \u201cideally bald.\u201d) \u201cAnd she wouldn\u2019t leave until she saw me take my hair off, because she thought that I and all the other guest stars were fucking with her,\u201d he recalled. \u201cShe\u2019s, like, \u2018Man, that is your hair. That\u2019s your hair. You got it done in the back like your mama would do.\u2019 I said, \u2018I promise you this is glued to my head.\u2019 And she was squealing with delight. She was going, \u2018Oh! This is crazy! This is crazy!\u2019 She just couldn\u2019t believe it.\u201d Call it method comedy.<\/p>\n

The two men are physically incongruous. Key is tall, light brown, dashingly high-cheek-boned, and L.A.<\/a> fit; Peele is shorter, darker, more rounded, cute like a Teddy bear. Peele, who is thirty-five, wears a nineties slacker uniform of sneakers, hoodie, and hipster specs. Key is fond of sharply cut jackets and shiny shirts\u2014like an ad exec on casual Friday\u2014and looks forty-three the way Will Smith<\/a> looked forty-three, which is not much. Before he even gets near hair and makeup, Key can play black, Latino, South Asian, Native American, Arab, even Italian. He is biracial, the son of a white mother and a black father, as is Peele. But though Peele\u2019s phenotype is less obviously malleable\u2014you might not guess that he\u2019s biracial at all\u2014he is so convincing in voice and gesture that he makes you see what isn\u2019t really there. His Obama<\/a> impersonation is uncanny, and it\u2019s the voice and hands, rather than the makeup lightening his skin, that allow you to forget that he looks nothing like the President. One of his most successful creations\u2014a nightmarish, overly entitled young woman called Meegan\u2014is an especially startling transformation: played in his own dark-brown skin, she somehow still reads as a white girl from the Jersey Shore<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Between chameleonic turns, the two men appear as themselves, casually introducing their sketches or riffing on them with a cozy intimacy, as if recommending a video on YouTube, where they are wildly popular. A sketch show may seem a somewhat antique format, but it turns out that its traditional pleasures\u2014three-minute scenes, meme-like catchphrases\u2014dovetail neatly with online tastes. Averaging two million on-air viewers, Key and Peele have a huge second life online, where their visually polished, byte-size, self-contained skits\u2014easily extracted from each twenty-two-minute episode\u2014rack up views in the many millions. Given these numbers, it\u2019s striking how little online animus they inspire, despite their aim to make fun of everyone\u2014men and women, all sexualities, any subculture, race, or nation\u2014in repeated acts of equal-opportunity offending. They don\u2019t attract anything approaching the kind of critique a sitcom like \u201cGirls\u201d seems to generate just by existing. What they get, Peele conceded, as if it were a little embarrassing, is \u201ca lot of love.\u201d Partly, this is the license we tend to lend to (male) clowns, but it may also be a consequence of the antic freedom inherent in sketch, which, unlike sitcom, can present many different worlds simultaneously…<\/p>\n

…Key, who thinks of himself as being from a slightly different era, has no interest in hip-hop (\u201cI\u2019m a sixties R. & B. man\u201d) and speaks of his personal life and history more readily, in a great flowing rush, though perhaps this is simply to save time, as the story comprises an unusual number of separate compartments. Born in Detroit<\/a>, he is the child of an affair between a white woman and her married black co-worker, and was adopted at birth by another mixed-raced couple, two social workers, Patricia Walsh, who is white, and Michael Key, who hailed from Salt Lake City<\/a>, \u201cwith the other twelve black people.\u201d The couple raised Key but divorced while he was an adolescent. Key\u2019s father then married his stepmother, Margaret McQuillan-Key, a white woman from Northern Ireland<\/a>. Key\u2019s familial situation was often in flux: after his own adoption came a sibling; then his parents\u2019 divorce and his father\u2019s remarriage….<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brother from Another Mother The New Yorker 2015-02-23 Zadie Smith Key and Peele\u2019s chameleon comedy. The wigs on \u201cKey and Peele\u201d are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business. Individually made, using pots of hair clearly labelled\u2014\u201cShort Black\/Brown, Human,\u201d \u201cLong Black, Human\u201d\u2014they are destined for the heads of a dazzling array of characters: old white sportscasters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,8,20],"tags":[16433,16432,19360,3886,1344],"class_list":["post-40013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-jordan-peele","tag-keegan-michael-key","tag-key-and-peele","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-zadie-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}