Key & Peele: “Make Fun of EVERYTHING”

Key & Peele, whose show is huge on Comedy Central, are about
the funniest guys around. Like their Comedy Central colleagues,
Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park, their humor
outrages many but entertains even more. In a great piece over at
Time, Key & Peele lay out the logic behind their unsparing,
unyielding, and ultimately uplifting approach to comedy.

Snippets:

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 women with comically large
breasts). [[Note: Click above to watch
sketch.] 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?…

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.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten the true purpose of
humor: to help people cope with the fears and horrors of the
world….

Ask yourself…what’s worse: making fun of people or assuming
that they’re too weak to take it?

The white whale of comedy is still out there. The day we can
make fun of a black lesbian dwarf with Down syndrome who’s in a
wheelchair, and someone who isn’t a black lesbian dwarf with Down
syndrome is able to laugh–instead of trying to protect the dwarf’s
feelings–we can pack up our artificial larynxes and retire.

Read
the whole thing.

Bonus vid: “Black Republicans”