This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
The comedic couple’s new book, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” explains the origins of the art form.
A person once could say, metaphorically, that actor, writer, and producer Keegan-Michael Key wrote the book on sketch comedy. His experience is vast, and he’s written and performed countless iconic sketches that deftly use wordplay to tap into cultural ironies and bring those ironies to life with his committed performances.
For example, in “Substitute Teacher,” a sketch on the Emmy Award-winning 2012-2015 Comedy Central show Key did with Jordan Peele called Key & Peele, Keegan is Mr. Garvey, a substitute biology teacher with a wonky hairline.
“I taught school in the inner city for over 20 years, so don’t even think about messing with me!” he declares, prophylactically, to a group of tame, bored white teenagers.
He begins roll call.
“Jay Quellin. Jay Quellin.”
Crickets.
He looks around the classroom. “There’s no Jay Quellin here? Where’s Jay Quellin at?”
A blonde sheepishly raises her hand. “Do you mean Jacqueline?”
“Okay. So, that’s how you want to play. I got my eye on you, Jay Quellin!”
Hilarious. Keegan’s timing is so sharp that at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ dinner, President Barack Obama introduced him as Luther, Obama’s anger translator, one of Keegan’s characters from Key & Peele.
Now we can say Keegan, along with his wife, well-known writer and producer Elle Key, has literally written the book on sketch comedy. They’ve just published The History of Sketch Comedy: A Journey Through the Art and Craft of Humor — a natural extension of their hit podcast of the same name — a book written in Keegan’s voice that proves to be something of a master class in the art of sketch comedy and the ultimate guide for any comedy nerd.
Fans and practitioners of sketch comedy will greatly benefit from the Keys’ wisdom. Key & Peele aside, their pedigree speaks for itself: Keegan-Michael Key, a Michigan native and Second City Chicago vet (he even taught there for six or seven years), earned a BFA in theater at the University of Detroit Mercy, and a subsequent MFA in theater at Penn State University. Most recently, he can be seen in the musical comedy streamer Schmigadoon!, Reboot, Friends From College, Fargo, and Parks and Recreation. He was a mid-aughts addition to the cast of Mad TV (along with longtime friend and collaborator Jordan Peele), a popular sketch-comedy show he was on for five years before making his own.
Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key attend the Clooney Foundation For Justice’s The Albies on September 28, 2023 in New York City.
Cindy Ord//Getty Images
As for Elle Key, she directs and produces the episodic Audible podcast version of The History of Sketch Comedy, for which the duo earned a 2022 Webby Award. She’s been “dabbling in and out of sketch as well for years” and has been writing for Keegan for a while. She’s produced a variety of films and TV shows, including The Cake Eaters, August, Boy Meets Girl, This American Journey, and Better Off Single, and produced TV game shows with Key, such as Brain Games and Game On! Her love of sketch comedy goes back to her days at Syracuse University, where she wrote and directed a sketch comedy show.
Keegan’s first exposure to sketch comedy was Saturday Night Live. “Mine was in the book,” Keegan says. “Seeing my father laugh at Eddie Murphy and not understanding exactly what was going on — I understood the humor I was watching; I just didn’t understand the art form yet. It was a television show that had these small stories on it, and that was what piqued my interest. What are these small stories? I was used to watching sitcoms with my parents. A sitcom is 21 to 26 minutes long, but then what were these small things that were like three minutes long, or these commercial parodies? I was just learning what those things were, so that was really when I dove in, and that was my first exposure to sketch comedy. I was hooked.”
Elle’s earliest sketch-comedy recollection is The Carol Burnett Show. “I don’t know how Keegan’s parents let him stay up that late, but I wasn’t allowed to watch Saturday Night Live, so I think we were watching Carol Burnett before Saturday Night Live, for some reason,” she says. “We were,” Keegan agrees. “Watching the silly sketches and the silly faces and the crazy hair — it’s one of the reasons why Keegan is dressed as Carol Burnett on the cover,” Elle continues. “Carol is also in the book; I was very lucky to be able to have an interview with Carol for it. I did get her permission [for Keegan’s cover Burnett look], by the way! I said, ‘We’re making a cover that has homages to sketch comedy greats and would love for Keegan to dress as you.’ Thankfully, she said yes.”
Elle says writing the book took “lots of begging and pleading.” She explains, “Years ago, someone suggested Keegan write something, and I said, ‘What about sketch comedy? We both know a thing or two about it.’ I promised to help him, and then I promised to help him a lot, and then I promised that I would make it as easy and as fun as possible,” she relates. “There are just so many stories, and so many incredible life experiences and journeys that Keegan has been on that relate in some way back to sketch or have something to do with sketch. Instead of just making a history book, I pitched this idea of using touchstones in Keegan’s life as the places to bring the reader into history, as if Keegan is the tour guide of the history of sketch comedy. He’s the one saying, ‘This is the journey that I took, and this is what we’ve learned along the way.’ I guess I’d say I opened up the top of his head, looked inside, and I said, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of amazing things inside there. I think they would be very entertaining for other people as well. Let’s see if we can share them and maybe bring some joy to the world.’”
The result is an engaging, thoroughly researched, fun, distinctively voicey read. Both Keys worked closely together and collaborated on just about every page. “Keegan did some research. I did some research. Sometimes my research was interviewing Keegan,” says Elle. “I think the majority of the actual sitting down, putting it to words, and putting it on the page was on me, but all of the inspiration, stories, motivation, and razzmatazz all came out of my love for Keegan and our mutual love of sketch comedy. I wrote a love letter to Keegan.”
Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key attend the 2023 TIME100 Gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 26, 2023 in New York City.
ANGELA WEISS//Getty Images
Structuring the book was rather intuitive. The podcast basically served as an outline, Elle explains. “The podcast really was maybe 98 percent scripted, which I think is a little bit of a secret that’s out now. I tried to figure out how to take Keegan’s verbal performance and make it feel fun and alive on a page. I wanted to write it so it sounded like Keegan was in your living room, sharing fun things that he learned along the way with you or with his friends.” It does.
Ten episodes seemed like the magic number to shoot for, so Elle says she went through ideas of what moments in history were important to Keegan and where he felt sketch seeds were being planted. “I pitched this outline to Audible — I think a 15-page outline that had jokes and characters and Keegan. It was so elaborate that someone at one point told me, ‘That’s not how an outline works.’” She stuck to her guns because she felt as if she were reinventing the wheel: “It didn’t follow a format that existed. I’m making up a format that takes you on different journeys that breaks it up, with Keegan laughing and Keegan explaining things with Keegan doing voices in the podcast. I wanted it to be fun and different, and I jumped off of that diving board to create the format for the book.”
Interspersed throughout are quotes and little personal stories from comedy’s biggest heavy hitters (among them Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and, of course, Carol Burnett). It was Elle’s job to chase them down. “The publisher asked if I would be able to get a few quotes from some people and sketch comedy they could use for the book, and I guess I don’t do anything halfway,” she laughs. “I ended up getting about 30 different sketch comedy masters to contribute.”
The book is thoroughly and lovingly researched, and the duo dug deep to find traces of comedy throughout history, reaching as far back as Sumer (yes, Sumer). “That was just a lot of research, but we both enjoy that quite a lot, looking up things, a lot of days on Wikipedia,” Keegan laughs. “It’s funny that it doesn’t occur to you until you’re writing a book like this to go on Google and look up the oldest joke in the world or first recorded joke. You don’t think to do that, and then you do it, and then it comes up with Sumeria. And you’re like, ‘Sumeria? Didn’t those guys invent the wheel? Didn’t they invent cuneiforms?’ I think the hardest thing to research would be what we couldn’t research. A worthy thing to study, anthropologically speaking, is what kind of sense of humor did cavemen have? What indication do we have, from cave drawings or around-the-fire anecdotes? If you’re being really literal about it, that would be the hardest thing to research. It’s an amazing time in our world, to be able to research something because who knew there was a joke — a fart joke nonetheless — but a joke that dates back to 1900 B.C. that somebody actually wrote down? That makes you wonder what jokes they didn’t write down!”
The History of Sketch Comedy: A Journey through the Art and Craft of Humor
The book also closely dissects the construction of comedy, something Keegan loves teaching. “Something that’s always been fascinating to me has been the structure of a scene, and the anatomy of a joke, or what propels a sketch forward. It was really important to Elle and to me that it be a component of the book. Schools are part of the history, whether that school is the commedia dell’arte in the 16th century or UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade],” he says.
“When Keegan and I first met and started talking about how to work together, things we like in common, and possible projects that we could collaborate on, I shared with him some of the jokes from my childhood — what we call the old Jewish jokes or jokes from the Catskills,” Elle adds. “Together, we broke down what makes a joke funny, why the ending is unexpected and inevitable, what a turn is. It was a conversation that we started maybe within a few months after we initially met, and it’s a conversation we have on almost a daily basis. What made that thing funny? Why did that work? What was that joke?”
Both Keegan and Elle hope The History of Sketch Comedy becomes one of those books people flag with Post-its to revisit or dig deeper into the sections that resonate with them. “One of the things that’s wonderful about the book and putting the book together is that Elle helped me have the confidence to take the opportunity to flaunt my geekdom,” Keegan says. “I think that’s what makes the book work. There are times when we’d be in the middle of a chapter, and Elle would say, ‘What else, what else?’ I’m like, ‘I could just write a whole book just about this!’ You can tell when people really love something, and this is a subject matter that’s really near and dear to us and brought us together in a way.”