Keegan-Michael Key has a ton of options when it comes to picking a favorite Key & Peele sketch. But he has a clear winner – and Halloween is the time to revisit him.
“It’s such a stupid sketch,” Key, 53, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “It’s called MJ Halloween.”
The 2012 sketch, from the second season of his and Jordan Peele’s Emmy-winning Comedy Central series, features Key as Noah, a man who shows up to a Halloween party in full Michael Jackson gear. He continues to perform the king of pop’s most famous moves and vocalizations — ad nauseam.
“I was dressed like Michael Jackson, like ‘Thriller’ Michael Jackson,” Key recalls. “And I just spend the next four minutes — there’s no script, just trying to make Jordan laugh.”
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Peele, 45, plays an entertainment host who can’t wait for Noah until the Jackson impersonator goes overboard. “I’m just trying to waste time and screw up the shots and do everything I can to make him laugh,” the actor says with a laugh. “That’s the whole bloody sketch.”
And, Key adds, Peele “never breaks down!”
The “Michael Jackson” skit ends with Peele’s annoyed character cutting off Key’s Noah, telling him that the impersonation is taking place specifically years after Jackson’s death in 2009. “He’s dead?” Key asks, lip quivering in horror. He continues to sing “boo-hoo” in Jackson’s voice as he moonwalks sadly away.
‘Key & Peele’.
Netflix
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“There was something that Jordan said in our first season, that the writing had to be bulletproof,” Key remembers of the sketch series’ evolution. “So if you watch the first seasons Key & Peeleit’s interesting, you’ll see that there isn’t much improvisation.”
He continues, “We were like, ‘We’ve just got to hit these jokes that are undeniable. Let’s write undeniable jokes and then play them and use the technical prowess of our editors and director to make people laugh at this thing.’ Only in the second season, the third season [we started to] relax and we’ll improvise.”
Key as a goofy Halloween version of Jackson was one of the series’ turning point sketches. From about that time onwards, says the Transformers one star, “We wrote some skits that were just very weird and weird. And it was fun! That was the fun part of the evolution.”
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‘Key & Peele’.
Comedy Central / courtesy of Everett
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Although he and Peele “don’t see each other that often anymore, which is a tragedy for me,” Key says, he fondly remembers Key & Peele skits like that, as well as the duo’s on-camera escapades on Fox Crazy TV from 2004 to 2009.
“We shared a creative language from the first time we met,” he says. “When we were in front of the cameras, it was alchemy.”
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Source: HIS Education