Feel Free

by Zadie Smith

  The skit alerts us to a shared trait that we may not have noticed until presented with it. But this is not the mild Jerry Seinfeldesque communality of coffee-drinking and airplane etiquette. It concerns the communality of race, about which we are rarely allowed to laugh. To say that the two men become, in that moment, “more black” is to concede, in one sense, to a racial stereotype—and yet if there is not such a thing as “blackness,” upon what does “being black” hinge? (To fondly identify a community, you have to think of its members collectively; you need to think the same way to hate them. The only thing a rabbi and an anti-Semite may share is their belief in the collective identity “Jewishness.”) “You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room,” Peele concludes. (In response to which Key muses, “You put five white-talking black guys in the same room . . . You come back in an hour? It’s gonna be like Ladysmith Black Mambazo up in here!”)

  A few months after this sketch aired, Obama—surely the whitest-sounding black man in most rooms he enters—went on Jimmy Fallon, and gave an unexpected shout-out to Key and Peele. He was responding to the “Obama Loses His Shit” sketch, in which Peele, as Obama, sits in a wingback chair for his weekly presidential address and calmly outlines the concerns of early 2012—Iraq, North Korea, Tea Party pushback, his own legitimacy—while Key, as his Anger Translator, Luther, paces up and down the room, saying the unsayable (“I have a birth certificate! I have a hot-diggity-doggity-mamase-mamasa-mamakusa birth certificate, you dumb-ass crackers!”). The sketch seemed to articulate an unspoken longing among many Obama supporters, and perhaps within the black community as a whole. I certainly hadn’t realized how much I wanted Luther until I saw him. Later that year, Obama asked to meet with Key and Peele, and wryly acknowledged the same desire. “I need Luther,” he told them. “We’ll have to wait till second term.”

  The sketch employs a comic reversal (Key: “I think reversals end up being the real bread and butter of the show”), but the emotional recognition gets the belly laugh. It has a famous antecedent in a 1986 sketch from SNL, in which Phil Hartman, playing Ronald Reagan, bumbles around the Oval Office—photo-ops with Girl Scouts, speaking inanities to journalists—but as soon as the press corps leaves, he’s all business: conversing in Arabic, understanding the Contras, quoting Montesquieu. “And that’s informed a handful of scenes of ours,” Peele explained. “It’s a version of that.” When they’re writing, they’re looking for the emotional root of the humor. “What’s the mythology that is funny just because people know it’s not true?” he continued. You need to be able to guess what many people really feel about something, even if they won’t ever dare say it. It’s this skill that is, in the end, every comic’s bread and butter. How does one develop it? Key, who has given a lot of thought to the matter, feels that both his empathic and his imitative skills are essentially a form of hyperresponsiveness. “The theory is: There’s no one in the world—there may be people as good as I am at this, but no one’s better than me at adapting to a situation.” If comic skill is a form of adaptation, Key and Peele had completed the necessary apprenticeship while still in short pants.

  Peele, reared in a one-bedroom walkup by a white “bookish” mother (a fact one might have been able to glean solely from his middle name: Haworth), barely knew his black father. (He was mostly absent and died in 1999.) A sketch from the second season, written by Peele’s old roommate Rebecca Drysdale, has Peele, playing himself, visiting a trailer park in search of his long-lost father (played by Key), who treats Peele with contempt until Peele lets slip that he has his own TV show. It’s a brutally funny scene, painful to watch once you’re aware of the personal history behind it. “I was in this ABC special called Kids Ask President Clinton Questions,” Peele recalled. “It was the last question of the day. I ask him, ‘What would you do: is there any way for you to help kids who aren’t getting child support?’” Yet Peele has, in common with Key, a tendency to interpret past pain as productive: “I was a kid that got to go to the White House and talk to the president. I was really in seventh heaven!” As well as appearing on television, Peele watched an epic amount of it—“Everything I do now, part of it is the fact that I had television as my second parent. Hours and hours”—and, for him, after the age of six, the most consistent black father figure in the home was on TV, refracted through the fun-house mirror of American pop culture. Many of the sketches on Key and Peele seem to play off black shows of the period, or reruns (Roots, Good Times, Family Matters), in scenes both loving and accusatory. In one, Steve Urkel turns up as a homicidal maniac.

  But if Peele wasn’t lonely, exactly—“There was a precedent for biracial latchkey kids”—and always, he says, felt loved, other people’s reactions complicated things. “I went to school, and the first kid goes, ‘Your mom’s white?’” he said. He had to quickly adapt to “what other people were used to and what other people were taught, and we were asked to identify what I was or whose side I was on: was I one or the other?” Key and Peele’s somewhat unusual insistence on their biracialism is motivated in part by a refusal to obscure white mothers to whom they were very close. For Peele’s mother, Lucinda Williams, who still lives in that walkup on the Upper West Side, the situation was made easier by living in Manhattan. “Having parents with different ethnic identities was not a particularly unusual situation here, nor was being raised by a single parent,” she told me. Peele, Williams says, was “obviously my joy,” but she had her share of dealing with other people’s incredulity, especially as a pale, blue-eyed blonde. Strangers, she said, tended to “assume he was adopted or I was watching someone else’s child. When he was still in a stroller, I would see people’s faces freeze and then look away upon leaning in to admire the baby. You could almost see a ‘Does Not Compute’ sign light up in their eyes.”

  As Peele grew, his increasing interest in performing surprised his mother. He had always seemed shy, “the quiet kid who likes to draw,” who loved movies about aliens, monsters and robots—all of whom tend to have no race at all. There were many literary books on the shelves, but Peele gravitated toward fantasy. (“Labyrinth. That’s my world,” Peele confirmed. “NeverEnding Story. Willow.”) Twenty years later, Key and Peele features many zombies and vampires, and annually delights in its Halloween episode. But Peele was part of that generation of nerds who, as Key pointed out, have conquered the earth—at least, the part that makes most popular entertainment. Wendell, whom Peele plays on the show—a three-hundred-pound recluse, fond of cheesy crusts and action figures, overly anxious to convince people that he’s “seeing someone, sexually”—is only a kind of obscene, comic extrapolation of Peele-the-fantasy-fan. “I think that ‘nerd’ is kind of an elusive term,” Peele said. “I guess technically it means someone who is obsessed with pop culture, and possibly without having the social graces themselves to deal with things. But the term ‘nerd’ that I relate to is more of the first part, where it’s just to be an unabashed fan of something.” Fandom remains the easiest way to draw Peele out. He is cautious on intimate subjects, happier discussing the classic nerd topics of his peers: Kubrick movies, nineties hip-hop, the inadvertent comic genius that is Kanye West.

  Key, who thinks of himself as being from a slightly different era, has no interest in hip-hop (“I’m a sixties R&B man”) 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, 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, “with the other twelve black people.” The couple raised Key but divorced while he was an adolescent. Key’s father then married his stepmother, Margaret McQuillan-Key, a white woman from Northern Ireland. Key’s familial situation was often in flux: after his own adoption came a sibling; then his parents�
�� divorce and his father’s remarriage.

  As a boy, he had ambitions in veterinary science, movie stardom and football, but when childhood epilepsy ruled out football his interest in performing surged ahead of everything else, a passion in which he was encouraged by his mother. Later, his stepmother suggested that he go abroad to study drama, and when he was eighteen she and his father sent him on a reconnaissance trip: “That was my end-of-high-school gift: to go to England. My stepmother said, ‘If you’re going to do theater for a living, you’ve got to do it right’”—here Key took a stab at a Belfast brogue—“They don’t fookin’ do it right here.” Key is, like Peele, a man of many voices. (His wife, Cynthia Blaise, is a dialect coach, though Key claims that her role is more supportive than instructive: “She doesn’t usually help me. She’s very sweet to say things like ‘No, I think you’ve got that, honey.’”) He picked up a few voices during his stay in London, where he had to adapt to yet another culture and another concept of “blackness.” While visiting family in Northern Ireland, he watched some TV coverage of Brixton and had a minor racial epiphany: “Holy shit, those are black people!” He loved the Olympic sprinter Linford Christie, amazed to hear such an unfamiliar voice emerging from so familiar a face. “My brain started to make that adjustment almost immediately, at eighteen years of age. My brain said, ‘Oh, I get it. It’s all cultural. None of it’s about melanin.’” Seven years later, he had a profoundly affecting reunion with his biological mother, Carrie Herr, which brought with it more siblings (“I literally went to bed one day with one sibling and woke up the next morning with seven”), and a sudden acceptance of Jesus Christ as his personal savior, an event that he has described as “pretty unexpected.” But adapting to unexpected emotional contingencies is what Key does best. “I’m not the smartest person in the world,” he offered. “But my EQ, my ‘emotional quotient’—off the charts.”

  On set, this serves him well. Key acknowledges that his flitting between personas can seem a spooky art to those of us who are stuck with our singular selves: “Very often, humans latch on to the first thing they can get hold of and go, ‘This is working. I’m gonna do this,’” he told me. “And what Jordan and I have latched on to is: ‘All of this is working.’” To Key, “the varied thing is the normative thing.” This brought to mind Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, who argued that the empathic skills one often finds in gifted children represent a symptom as much as a gift, a child’s reactive response to the inconsistencies and unexpectedness around him. Key has read the Miller—he calls it “an amazing book”—but considers himself removed now from the traumas that may have shaped his skills: “It was a tool you were using to survive when you were younger and now you can use for other ends.” The way he rattles off his complex past, as if it had all happened to another man, seems related to this; able to see himself from a distance, he speaks like a writer describing a character. He notes, too, that he seldom feels “strongly about things,” and when observing other people he has an almost anthropological reaction: what would it be like to feel so deeply attached to one point of view?

  While race can appear abstract to Key and Peele, especially when seen through the lens of their own unconventional backgrounds, for many of their viewers race is neither an especially fluid nor a changeable category; it is the determining fact of their lives. Within the rigid categories of media representation, for example, Key and Peele are two black men who star in a TV show that has unusual crossover appeal, and matters that might seem neutral on other shows—like the casting of “love interests”—must be more carefully considered. Key, whose wife is white (Peele’s partner, the stand-up and comic actress Chelsea Peretti, is also white), pronounced himself “hyperaware” of the issue: “It’s one thing that you can control.” For a recent sketch, in which Key finds a woman collapsed on the ground, and during his subsequent 911 call falls in love with her, the script required that the woman be “staggeringly gorgeous.” When casting her, Key said, “It was very important to me not to have a light-skinned woman.” In telling this story, he assumed, for the moment, the voice of a disgruntled viewer: “These two niggas ain’t got nothing but white women on this show!”

  Once, backstage on a Key and Peele college tour, taking pictures with the student volunteers, hugging and chatting with them, Key mentioned to Peele that he sometimes had a bad feeling about the way he conducted these interactions. “And then Jordan said, ‘Why?’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Because when I’m around the black girls I hug them and give them more attention.’ Because ain’t nobody been shit on more than black women. They just deserved more because of the fucking shit. It’s one thing to get whipped. It’s another thing to get whipped and raped. Do you know what I mean? It’s just horrible. And not that white women don’t have problems.” The painful history of black women in America, Key stressed, “won’t leave me. I think of my grandmother and my aunts. It reverberates. And so it’s, like, a woman with dark-chocolate skin should be an image of beauty for anybody just as much as a woman with milk-white skin.” Although, he added, “none of it actually should matter.” But it does, of course. A scene in which Key and Peele play two husbands mortally afraid of their wives could be read as a satire on middle-class marital mores, regardless of race, but when Key appeared on Conan and claimed, in reference to the sketch, that “there is nothing more dangerous on planet Earth than a black wife,” he resurrected a familiar insult, too often directed at black women, some of whom pointed out, online, that Key has no personal experience on which to draw his conclusion. They felt hurt precisely because they were black women, speaking from a singular place and with a singular experience.

  Peele, when asked about how race is dealt with on the show, said, “Really, there’s no actual strategy, and there’s no perspective that would be easy to . . . to state. Much like race in this country. It’s so nuanced. It’s so complicated. It’s so deep-seated, and, at the same time, it’s evolving, and then it feels like it devolves. And it’s this nebulous thing.” I thought of that William Gibson quote: “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” It can’t be easy making race comedy in such a mixed reality: a black president on the one hand, black boys dying in the streets on the other. It’s a difficult omelette, and you’re going to break some eggs trying to make it. But getting it right means penetrating to the heart of a long and painful national conversation.

  In one sketch, Peele appears as a young black man walking through a white suburb. A mother shoos her children indoors; a man mowing his lawn gives Peele a warning glare; a cop slowly tracks him in his squad car, his eyes filled with preemptory violence. Then Peele puts up his hoodie: the face of a young white man is painted in profile on the side, obscuring Peele’s. The cop smiles and waves. A minute long and wordless, it’s a wonderfully pure comic provocation. “We just kind of put ourselves in the center of it, moment to moment,” Peele said, referring to America’s race issue. Ultimately, he hoped that their show will be “a mirror. I think there’s even an element of the Rorschach test.” He meant a mirror held up to the audience, but it is, of course, also a mirror of Key and Peele’s own attitudes, which, like everybody’s, aren’t always completely within their control.

  On my last day on set, I sat behind the cameras, next to Joel Zadak. We had some dead time on our hands; Key and Peele’s stand-ins, Shomari (tall, light brown) and Brian (shorter, dark brown), were texting while the crew tested the lights against their complexions. Zadak is a youthful forty-three, with a sharp quiff and an unlined face, and was a comedy nerd before he became a comedy manager: hanging around the Second City Chicago, moving to LA to study screenwriting, hoping to be an improv guy himself. Now, as one of the executive producers on the show, he is content to be behind the scenes, and has the aura of a laid-back dude, despite his typical LA TV schedule. (“You know, I wake up in the morning at five o’clock. I read for an hour. I go to the gym for an hour. I take one of the kids to sc
hool, come to work . . .”) Describing the pair, he reached for a Beatles analogy “where Keegan is Paul, and Jordan is John. Where Keegan can write and perform a hit song all day long, and people will love him, and Jordan can do the same, but I think people look a little bit more deeper into what Jordan’s doing. He’s a little bit more of a deep thinker.” (The previous day, Atencio had made the same analogy.) What most impresses Zadak about his clients, though, is their openness. They never “dismiss anything out of hand. They listen to everything.”

  Beyond the introvert-extrovert paradigm, it is perhaps this openness that strikes people as Beatles-like, for, to keep moving forward, as the Beatles did, you have to be constantly listening, second-guessing reactions, preempting tastes, adapting. If this is hard enough to do in music, it is even more difficult in comedy. The world is full of calcified comedians who stop—sometimes very suddenly—being funny, too attached to a joke’s familiar neural pathway, perhaps, or too dogmatic, unable to change. How do you stay funny? It’s a question that “haunts” Peele: “My biggest fear is someday reaching that point at which I see a lot of artists and comedians, where they stop growing. They had that success at a certain point, and it worked. And they cash in and they forget to continue to evolve.”