‘Key and Peele’ Helped Pave the Way For ‘Get Out’

Over Key & Peele’s five seasons, the duo has taken audiences back to Nazi Germany several times, and the results have always been surprisingly silly yet insightful. “Das Negros” certainly falls into that category. Starring Ty Burrell as an S.S. officer, the sketch follows Burrell’s character as he tries to figure out whether or not the two men clearly in white face are black. If you think about it, it’s a horrifying sketch as these two men’s lives depend on whether or not they can fool one very incompetent Nazi. However, the sketch’s brilliance and silliness comes from the many ways Burrell’s character tries to test Key and Peele. It’s a clumsiness that subtly mocks the many ways people (largely white people) claim to intimately understand black culture as they cluelessly stereotype and over simplify.

This 2014 sketch is one of the few in the series that showed off Peele’s talent for pure horror. In “Make-a-Wish,” Peele plays a dying little boy whose sick fantasies to see the world burn becoming the running joke of the sketch. Peele’s Liam is half Damien from The Omen, half Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs. Just know that he’s completely creepy, and if it wasn’t for Key’s expert timing, this is a sketch that could have easily drifted into straight up horror.

I will always stand by “A Cappella” as being one of Key & Peele’s best sketches of all time. The four-minute sketch highlights all of the duo’s strengths, from its charmingly low-stakes premise to its expert blending of hyper-dramatization and levity to make a social point. And the social point that Key & Peele makes is a bleak one -—there’s only room for a certain amount of black men in white communities. The sketch plays with the weird give and take of acceptance and rejection that Get Out explores. Sure, it only takes Peele’s character 25 minutes to infiltrate a group of white, singing men, but there’s clearly a problem with having two black men in the same group. It should be noted that it’s only Key and Peele’s characters that seem to have a problem with the dynamic. However, the sketch has decades of token black friend tropes in film and television to stand on, so its point and the underlying tension are clear.

Tonally, this silly sketch may be the closest to Peele’s new movie. While two aerobics dancers are strutting their stuff, one of them learns that his wife and daughter have been murdered. It’s a very stylized sketch with much of its upbeat tone relying on the 1980s live TV graphics and peppy music. However, what makes this sketch notable is how it conveys something truly horrible with a smile. That’s a theme that has Get Out written all over it.

Structurally, visually, and artistically, this 2015 sketch may be the one of the most ambitious projects the series has ever tackled. It’s also the most rewarding as well as the clearest predecessor to Get Out. Both Get Out and “Negrotown” hinge on the same general conceit — a world that looks one way but is another. However, whereas Get Out exposes the underlying horrors of a smiling liberal bubble, “Negrotown” does the opposite, imagining an idealistic, non-racist world before shoving its protagonist back into reality. They’re certainly both extremes, but there’s something so devastating about Key being ripped out of his perfect musical fantasy to be thrown to the real world that aligns with Chris’ (Daniel Kaluuya) fate. Both are sobering, both are disturbing, but only one has a catchy musical number.

Get Out is in theaters now.

Where to stream Key & Peele