'Key and Peele' Keep It Light While Getting Seriously Heavy

image

Key and Peele returns to Comedy Central on Wednesday night with an exceedingly strong half-hour that once again demonstrates the range of not only the duo’s performance skills, but their ideas as well.

I’m sure the introduction of Hillary Clinton’s own “anger translator,” who meets Peele’s Obama and Key’s Luther, will get a lot of notice during a political season in which Clinton (played impeccably by Kate Burton) is ossifying into a figure of steely intransigence. (Credit Key and Peele, whose production schedule meant this must have been filmed a while ago, with shrewd prescience for anticipating the cold, bitter Hillary alter ego portrayed here.)

And there’s a sketch about politically-correct pirates, who will bellow a hearty “Yo-ho-ho” but not just “Ho,” “because that would be disrespectful.” The sketch features the kind of lushly detailed staging that makes Key and Peele stand out visually from every other Comedy Central series.

Related: ‘Key and Peele’ Addresses Police Brutality in Musical ‘Negrotown’ Sketch

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are in love with language — they like to bend it, shape it, make it do things that are both absurd and revelatory. This element of their sensibility is brought to a new level in a sketch about two excessively gung-ho anti-terrorist airline passengers, who are all too eager to tear into “some terry” — their term for terrorists — and I’m not going to spoil the jokes by trying to transcribe the duo’s adroit puns and tongue-twisters.

It’s one of the final sketches on Wednesday night, though, that’s the most striking: Key, in white-face, plays a cop who shoots at blacks for the most shockingly trivial reasons — a guy holding a banana, for instance. The tone of the sketch is frenetic and wacky, with Key’s white cop an exasperated bumbler who’s always yelping excuses and “My bad!” But the terror in the faces of his black victims, and the pass the white cop gets for his actions, brings Key and Peele into some grave, heavy territory that the comedians manage to navigate with superb skill.

Key and Peele airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on Comedy Central.