Comedy Central duo Key and Peele are on a roll. After landing on the cover of New York Times Sunday Magazine last year, this week they are cover boys for national weekly news magazine Time. It’s the Ideas Issue, and Key and Peele offer an opinion piece about comedy that may or may not make you laugh, but at the very least will make you think. Check it out below:
Would you make fun of a burn victim? Well, we did. Sort of… We’re comics. In the most recent season of our TV show, in a sketch titled “Insult Comic,” a traditional stand-up comedian professes that he is “going to get everybody” in his set (the guy toward the front with big ears, the fat guy, the woman with comically large breasts). That’s the phrase, isn’t it, when a critic wants to praise a comedian for the fearless nature of his or her comedy? That he or she “gets everybody”? That “nobody is safe”? One of the club patrons in our sketch, however, is a wheelchair-bound burn victim. “You skipped me,” he calls from the audience, with a robotic-sounding artificial larynx. “Go for it,” he says, “I can take it.”
But can we, as a society, take it anymore?
Today it seems that we live in a world of extremes. On one end of the spectrum, we have anonymous Internet trolls looking for opportunities to dole out cruelty with impunity. But in mainstream culture, it often seems we’re drowning in a sea of political correctness that lapped up on our shores a couple of decades ago and has yet to recede.
It’s amazing to think how popular television shows like All in the Family and Good Times might fare today in a Hollywood pitch meeting. Films like Blazing Saddles and Silver Streak wouldn’t make it past the development stage at a studio. Too edgy.
Posts tagged as “Comedy Central”
Key and Peele, the popular sketch comedy show starring biracial MAD TV vets Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael-Key, has been renewed for a fourth season. The show has grown from a cult success to a bonfide hit, with fans tuning in Wednesday nights and consuming their online clips by the millions.
With breakout sketches like the East/West Bowl, Luther the Obama translator, Mr. Garvey (“A-aron!”) and the Liam Neeson-loving valet guys, they duo have become comedy legends in the making. Tonight the hilarious tag team host their very first Halloween special airing on Comedy Central at 10:30 pm EST.
article via thegrio.com
In 2005, Dave Chappelle was merely the hottest comedian in America. Then he left his job and became a far more singular cultural figure: A renegade to some, a lunatic to others, but most of all, an enigma. Now he is making a kind of comeback — Mr. Chappelle headlines the Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival, a new 15-city tour presented by the Funny or Die Web site that begins Friday in Austin, Tex. — and what makes it particularly exciting is how he’s using his hard-earned mystique to make more daring and personal art.
Mr. Chappelle didn’t just walk away from a $50 million contract and the acclaimed “Chappelle’s Show,” whose second season on Comedy Central stacks up well against the finest years of “SCTV,” “Saturday Night Live” and Monty Python. He did so dramatically, fleeing to Africa and explaining his exit in moral terms: “I want to make sure I’m dancing and not shuffling,” he told Time magazine. Since then, he has been a remote star in an era when comedians have never been more accessible.
Mr. Chappelle hasn’t done any interviews (aside from a radio appearance in 2011) or appeared on podcasts or talk shows. He doesn’t even have a Web site. He joined Twitter last year, then quit after 11 tweets. But Mr. Chappelle has tiptoed back into the public eye over the last year. While he has stayed away from movies and television, he still drops in pretty often on comedy clubs and occasionally theaters, usually in surprise appearances that generate more rumors of a comeback. Beyond the Oddball Festival, Chris Rock has said Mr. Chappelle may join him on his stand-up tour next year.
Dave Chappelle is back in the spotlight and reclaiming his title as one of America’s favorite comedians. The stand-up legend is co-headlining Funny or Die Presents The Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival, a comedy tour launching late this summer. The comedy duo and music band Flight of the Conchords will join him in hosting and performing throughout the tour.
“The Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival w/ Dave Chappelle & Flight of the Conchords is going to destroy your funny bone this summer!” says a descriptor on the tour’s official site. The 5-weekend tour will kick off its first show in Austin, Texas on August 23rd and will appear in 12 other cities through Sept. 20.
Although Chappelle has performed stand-up across the country over the years, his recent series of gigs with comedian Chris Rock had many speculating his big return to the limelight. Now, the tour marks the funnyman’s high-profile return to the center stage since his abrupt departure from Comedy Central’s Chappelle’s Show in 2003.
Tickets go on sale Friday, June 21.
article by Lilly Workneh via thegrio.com
Comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele grace the cover of this week’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?” The Comedy Central duo illustrates the work of Wharton professor Adam Grant, and his theories on workplace dynamics.
Click to read the full nytimes.com article and view all pictures.
via Key and Peele grace cover of New York Times Magazine | theGrio.