YMMV / Key & Peele

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Commenters have noted that Keegan-Michael Key's creepy landlord actually comes across as a good guy — making sure his property is in good condition prior to renting it out, apologizing if anything is wrong and promising to make repairs, and violently ensuring the safety and well-being of his tenants.
  • Did Timothy from the second substitute teacher actually have a daughter, or was he just lying to take his club yearbook photo and knew that saying that would get him excused?
• Alternative Joke Interpretation:
  • The end of the "These Nuts" sketch. Was he crying because his dad died? Because his dad refused to take him seriously even on his death bed? Because his dad got the last laugh? Because being on the receiving end caused him to decide that his coworker was right all along about the titular joke not being as funny as he thought? Or was he actually laughing uproariously?
  • "Consequences" ends with Donnie smoking crack to calm down and immediately getting smacked by a wrecking ball. Considering there are no other characters in the frame when this happens and the skit ends before anyone can react, does this mean he was telling the truth about the consequences of his actions… or does this mean he's been hallucinating weird things happening to him due to drug overuse?
• Anvilicious: The show frequently addresses racism towards black people, "Negrotown" was the bluntest and darkest version of their message. In the sketch, Key's character is arrested but saved by a homeless man and taken to Negrotown, a utopia for black people who are unburdened by the systematic racism of America and cultural appropriation. Then they do a whole musical number about how they are "free to wear your hoodie without being shot" ^note  Referring to the 2012 incident where George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin , "Can walk down a street without being stopped, harassed, or beat", "No trigger-happy cops or scared cashiers" ^note  Referring to many, many accounts of police brutality , "Won't get followed if you try to shop", “no stupid ass white folks touching your hair or stealing your culture claiming it’s theirs” ^note This refers to hairstyles, such as the box braids, being copied by white people without heeding their ancestral history or cultural meaning, only wearing it because it's aesthetically pleasing. At the same time, white people were shaming black people for wearing those hairstyles , and “no one trying to get in on the latest trend by making you their token black friend” to name a few. However, Negrotown doesn't exist as Key's character is taken away by a racist cop at the abrupt and dark end of the song.
  Key: This sounds too good to be true
  Peele: It does doesn’t it?
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The school's name in "If Hogwarts Were an Inner-City School" is called "Vincent Clortho Public School for Wizards". Clortho is very similar to Clotho, one of the sisters of fate from Greek Mythology who's responsible for spinning the thread of human life and deciding who should be born and who should die. It's also a reference to Vinz Clortho, the Keymaster from Ghostbusters.
  • The sketch "Dad's Hollywood Secret" features the funeral of a civil rights leader, Otis Carmichael, who (unbeknownst to most of his friends and family) was once an actor in Hollywood. His son finds a reel of his performances, but they turn out to all be extremely racist stereotypes of the kind that used to be the only roles Hollywood movies offered black actors. It's pretty hilarious, but as this YouTube commenter pointed out, there's more depth — both heartwarming and depressing — to Otis' story.
    A Chill Skeleton: When you really think about it this kinda makes Otis’s life story all the more deep. He aspired to be an actor during his young life but unfortunately Hollywood did not want him to play any other roles than the ones showed here. Realizing the discrimination he was facing in show bizz he fought in the civil rights movement so that other people of color could have an actual chance at being actors. He fought so other people wouldn’t have their dreams crushed like he did.
  • EEEEE EEEEEEEEE (pronounced as dolphin sounds) is from San Diego State University. What's in San Diego? SeaWorld.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The "Superbowl 2015" skit points out the stereotypical way white sportscasters discuss NFL players, describing white players as analytical and smart and black players as strong and aggressive. In 2019, two former players would file a lawsuit against the NFL for using "race-norming" when deciding evaluating those who applied for compensation for dementia that could be attributed to a player's time in the league. In application evaluations, the NFL would assume all black players had a lower cognitive function than their white peers and thus would deny black players (who make up over 60% of the league) compensation at rates far higher than their white players[1]. In other words, the NFL really did treat black athletes as just Dumb Jocks and white athletes as Academic Athletes, making this joke hit harder now than it did before in light of this.
  • In some of the live studio audience segments, Key talks about being happily married to his wife. After the show ended, he has since divorced said wife and remarried. On the funnier side of the coin, Peele, who expresses his distaste for marriage in the same segments, got married a year after the show ended.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Keegan-Michael Key used to host The Planet's Funniest Animals. He's like the black Bob Saget! And then there's clips like this...
  • Barack Obama shouting out to Key and Peele about three months after this. It was taken to the next logical conclusion here.
  • One of the players in the "East/West Bowl 2" sketch is a Hawaiian with a very long name. About a day after the video was posted on YouTube, a Hawaiian woman was denied a driver's license because her name was too long to fit on it.
  • The Anger Translator skit following the first debate included a line about Mitt Romney getting more reboots than Spider-Man. Since then, Spider-Man has been rebooted again.
  • Another one of the "Obama's Anger Translator" skits had Luther brag about playing Halo 4 all day if Obama didn't get re-elected. Key would later voice the lead character for HUNT the TRUTH, a Viral Marketing campaign for Halo 5: Guardians.
  • One sketch is about '70s funk music and the tendency towards Word Salad Lyrics. "Uptown Funk" would prove that this was far from dead.
  • In the "Obama Raps" sketch, a rapper in the street says, "I'm the boss and the king!", after which Obama, played by Peele, pulls up in his limo, takes the mic and says, "I'm the leader of the free world" and drops the mic. At the 2016 White House Correspondents Dinner, Obama's last dinner as President, he ended his speech with a mic drop, saying, "Obama out!".
  • One of the funniest skits is the one where terrorists bemoan that the TSA's dumb (to us) policies are actually stopping them from carrying out attacks. In Jordan Peele's Get Out, Rodney, a TSA agent, comes to Chris's (the protagonist's) rescue at the end. TSA saves the day once again.
  • Just the whole premise of Luther, as senator Cory Booker has not only gained popularity for embodying some angry black man mannerisms himself, but also bears a surprising resemblance (looks and voice) to Key. He even played him on Saturday Night Live.
  • In one of the stand-ups between sketches in s1ep4 "The Branding", Key mentions how neither he or Peele could be rappers. Then one year later, they starred in Epic Rap Battles of History's Gandhi vs. MLK Jr and Michael Jordan vs. Muhammad Ali.
  • Just the large number of Nightmare Fuel moments for a comedy series in general, now that Peele has successfully broken into the horror genre after Get Out:
    • One of the standup intros has Key and Peele talking about how they're often cast as the Token Black Friend since neither of them make a convincing Scary Black Man - and now Peele is an acclaimed horror director, making him a legit Scary Black Man!
  • One sketch is about what Forest Whitaker as a toddler would be like, with Peele's face photoshopped onto an actual toddler in one of the landmark unsettling moments in the series. In 2019, Peele would follow Whitaker's footsteps by becoming the host of The Twilight Zone.
  • The sketch where the valets gush about their favorite movies, starting from Iron Man before escalating to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is a double whammy. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's writer and director Shane Black would helm Iron Man 3 and eventually Key would be cast in Black's The Predator.
  • At one point during the "Continental Breakfast" skit, Peele's character becomes fascinated over a spork.
  • In the sketch "Cool Teacher vs. Class Clown", Key's character tries to mimic Peele's character in a rather unintentionally similar high pitched voice to that of Toad from the Super Mario Bros. franchise. This was years before he would be cast in the The Super Mario Bros. Movie as Toad, and some fans were quick to notice this one.
  • One sketch jokingly claimed that every black person on the planet has "The Shining". In the sequel Doctor Sleep, the deuteragonist is a black girl^note Technically mixed race, due to being related to Danny Torrance who possesses the shining.
  • Latrell, the Camp Gay office worker bears a strong (and ironic) resemblance to rugby player Israel Folau, who in 2019 made a series of homophobic comments that cost him his position^note He was contractually obligated to keep those kinds of opinions to himself, which led to Christian fundamentalists declaring that he was persecuted.
  • Keegan has a recurring segment on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, "Maybe Coming Soon", where he and Stephen have to make up the movie premises for fake movie posters they've just seen. One is the fairly straightforward "My Wife's Friend's Husband", about two guys who are expected to get to know each other just because their wives know each other, which could act as the backstory for the well-known "I Said Bitch" sketch.
  • In the "Playing a Thug" sketch, Key plays a British actor named Nigel playing a Brooklyn gangster. His performance is given consistent praise by the director while Peele's Antoine, an actual born and raised Brooklyn former gangster is told that his performance isn't believable. Cut to Get Out where British actor Daniel Kaluuya plays American Chris Washington.
  • One skit called "Pirate Chantey" is done in the traditional sea shanty style, but is easy to overlook if you weren't following the show. Come January 2021, sea shanties went viral and many new viewers found the skit. They praised it for being fun and Accidentally-Correct Writing.
  • Obama and Luthor's final sketch has the anger translator read aloud the letter that former presidents are expected to write for their successors. Obama's letter to Donald Trump was "Go fuck yourself". 5 years later and word got out that the real Barack Obama actually did have some expletive-laden words for Trump that he kept behind closed doors. It was also revealed that Trump had a habit of destroying White House documents, including the actual letter.
  • One of the episodes has Key and Peele talking about how much they enjoy horror movies, in particular Candyman, and mention that a black person would never try to summon Candyman. Come 2021, Jordan Peele would co-write and produce a new entry into the Candyman franchise with that exact premise.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • The bully from "School Bully" is a bullying Jerk Jock, but he hates himself so much and has gone through tough shit lately such as him not doing very good at his third grade level and seeing someone reading and enjoying it and making him feel depressed and has been having sexual fantasies about other people at school, and he can't control his emotions and on top of that, his mother divorced his father and has been living in disgrace ever since.
  • "Wendell's Broken Superman Bed" implies that Wendell is this deep down, as shown by his rant at his Stimpy plush about how "Stimpy" needs to stop being so lonely.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The picture of Peele's character sweating heavily in the "Clear History" sketch is used by many as a response emote that can be summed up as an Oh, Crap!.
  • The "Obama Meet & Greet" short, where Obama greets black guests like bros but is coldly professional to white guests, sometimes gets used in fan videos representing fandoms embracing or rejecting various installments of their series.
  • "CONSEQUENCES!"^explanation A former gang member brought in to a school assembly as a motivational speaker tells about the crimes he did, then reveals the completely nonsensical "consequences" he suffered; at the end, smoking crack somehow causes him to be hit with a wrecking ball. Fans of the show have since taken to yelling "CONSEQUENCES!" whenever a sketch has a particularly unexpected conclusion.
  • People named Jacqueline, Blake, Denise, or Aaron (especially that last one) know how memetic this show can get.
    • "YOU DONE MESSED UP, A-A-RON!" gets applied to Aarons from Moses's brother Aaron in The Bible to Aaron Burr in Hamilton.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Apparently, after the first season of the show aired, Key and/or Peele were approached by a Latino gangster who asked them why they didn't make any jokes about Latino gangsters. Key and Peele obliged, so in the second season, we got the "Chairs are for pussies" sketch.
• One-Scene Wonder: In the "Les Mis" sketch, Nicole Parker breaks out some serious singing pipes.
• Paranoia Fuel: Luther: "I got Tweets fo' yo' ass! Y'all best follow me... or I'll follow YOU!"
• Special Effects Failure: At the end of "Cunnilingus Class", when Key and Peele take off their heads to reveal that they're actually two women, the women's heads are very obviously balanced on Key and Peele's bodies. However, given the hammy nature of their performance in the earlier part of the sketch, this could be a deliberate piece of Stylistic Suck.
• Squick:
  • Obama trolling Republicans leads to one of the older ones cutting off his own tongue.
  • In the "Dubstep" sketch, when the music makes Key freak out and mutilate himself by pulling out a tooth and ripping off one of his fingernails.
  • The sketch "The Worst Drug Ever". Three stoner friends, two played by Key and Kumail Nanjiani, interact with a drug dealer, played by Peele, who tries to get them to take what he calls the "God Drug", which turns out to be razor-sharp crystals that must be inserted under the eyelid to cause bleeding in the eye socket through which the drug mixes into the blood that seeps into the brain cavity, with an alleged side effect of the high being defecating out the mouth, i.e. putting your entire digestive system in reverse. In the end, one is convinced to try it, and while thankfully there's a Gory Discretion Shot, there are still audible sounds of squelching and stabbing. And just as they start to question when the drug high will happen, the dealer responds by wondering how should he know, since he doesn't do drugs because "drugs are for losers", followed by a PSA advert appearing and warning "Don't even try it. You'll poop your mouth."
  • "Soul Food", wherein two friends constantly try to one-up each other by ordering more extreme varieties of down-home cooking; while their demands start off delicious enough, if decidedly unhealthy, they quickly escalate into repulsively inedible fare (and, by the end, cannibalism).
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The R & B number heard in "Secret Emotions" is a clear pastiche of "Back to One" by Brian McKnight
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The switch from a live studio to an overarching plot where the two drive through the desert in Seasons 4 and 5 took some getting used to. To say nothing of the sketches getting noticeably darker in their humour.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The effect of pasting Peele's head onto the body of a 5-year-old is hilariously unsettling.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: In "The Worst Guy to Run Into After the Apocalypse", Peele's character runs into and subsequently kills a tackily-dressed weirdo played by Key, who spends his time dancing, touching mannequins, swinging swords and talking to himself. While Key's character is clearly weird, viewers found him fun and likeable and thought Peele shooting him was Disproportionate Retribution, especially since Key acts incredibly friendly towards Peele when he spots him shortly before he dies.
• The Woobie:
  • Wendell is a sad and lonely man with multiple issues, and needs a hug badly. In "The Power of Wings", just as he is finally living out his fantasy of being a romantic hero in a music video, before he can rescue the princess, the money runs out and his dreams fall to pieces.
  • In "High on Potenuse", Peele's character looks like a kicked puppy when the credit for his original joke is stolen and everyone scorns him.
  • Mr. Williams is driven insane by a rowdy student and loses his teaching license while said student coasts through life. Even the sketch itself seems to take pleasure in his undeserved misfortune.