Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 23

Jordan Peele: No, at some point you've just got to go- Key: Yeah, you've got to delegate. Trust people and delegate.

Judd: Do you have people that you could trust with a full episode? Could you say, "I'm so burned out, I am not even going to watch this one," and have faith that it's going to be solid?

Key: Yeah. I've watched episodes on TV with my wife at night and I'll see little cuts of things and go, "Oh, that was a nice little touch."

Peele: There was an episode where an old edit got used by accident, though.

Key: Oh, s.h.i.+t. That's true.

Peele: Something got by and I didn't...I was so p.i.s.sed. They're fixing it now for all the future airings and stuff, but I couldn't blame anybody because I didn't screen it.

Judd: Yeah, you remember those things forever. What level of control freak are you guys at?

Peele: I feel like, in the beginning, I wanted to be part of every single stage of the process. There was a fear that it wouldn't go right. When I was at MADtv, it was crazy. I felt like I was putting good work in and then it would somehow get corrupted: Some edit would get made or a sketch I wrote that I thought was genius wouldn't get picked. That whole mentality made me a real control freak. But you know, like we were saying, this time we had no choice but to let go of the reins a little.

Key: I'm-to my detriment-a very trusting Pollyanna, and that can lead to times when a piece of work suffers, so I try to be a little bit more of a control freak. But my thing is-and this is not necessarily the best process-but, once we get on set, I know Jordan and I can fix anything. We can fix anything on set.

Judd: In the writing?

Key: Yeah, the writing, but even in the performance.

Peele: With this double season, when they requested twenty-one episodes, I think our first response was, like, We're going to kill ourselves. We're going to kill ourselves working this hard. One fear we had-and we had a serious discussion about this-was that we've been designing the whole process of this show so we kind of can't fail, but all of a sudden we're doing twice as many episodes. And one little dip in quality at this point is, I think, a legacy-affecting dip. Same thing if we get better. Plateauing, we're okay with, but it's not great. So that was the big thing: What is the show going to do? Dip, plateau, or get better? And I still can't tell what it is.

Judd: During the last season of Kids in the Hall, it felt like they had so burned through their ideas that they went to some other crazy, absurd level. It was definitely hit-and-miss, but there were things in it that were so insanely funny-things you could only have written if you were burned out.

Key: Right, exactly. And to be honest with you, I actually think the second half of our fourth season, we will not plateau. I believe that it's going to be better. Because when you've been working with someone for eleven years, you get to a place where there's going to be something only you can do. Like Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. They're at a place where only they can do something that way, and I feel like we have things only we can do, and so it will excel and it will grow. It will grow.

Judd: It must be a big trial by fire for you guys, as friends, to be under that much pressure. Especially with this season getting so much positive attention, and you guys being on the cover of Time magazine and everything. That's a lot to have on your plate at once.

Key: It's been interesting. There are fellow writers who were early adopters of the show, people who have been on board since day one. But more interesting to me are the regular people, who don't have anything to do with our industry, who have gotten on board. I want to meet those people. I think a lot of those late adopters are probably biracial like us and said, Oh my gosh, here is a show for me. That's why the quality has to stay up, because you've got new people watching the show now. It's like a series of tidal waves-and in the midst of it, you keep walking up to podiums and receiving awards and just going, "Thanks," and then: "Oh, I've got to get back to the office now."

Peele: It is weird, but all the cool accolades have really beaten the enormous paychecks in coming to us.

Judd: Right. You're not making as much money as your accolades would suggest, and eventually, you just get p.i.s.sed at everyone.

Key: Just steaming, staring at your Peabody Award, like, Those f.u.c.kers. This system is not working.

Judd: Cosby's made so much more money than we have. And it makes the accolades feel like some kind of weird accident. But I think the next couple of years, it will continue to sink in. Like: Oh, this was a crazy time for us.

Judd: What really sticks out?

Key: The Peabody Award, don't you think?

Judd: That's a great award. Your program shows that prejudices and the way people were and are ignorant are ridiculous and should be mocked. Like my daughter, she's mad that we even have to talk about h.o.m.ophobia because she doesn't understand how anyone would feel that way. She actually gets upset. But that's because her generation grew up saying h.o.m.ophobia is stupid, racism is stupid, and so it's not even in their heads. I think comedy has helped affect that. Do you get that sense?

Peele: Our target demo was teenagers, and so we were forced to make a show that was relevant to them. A lot of the work we did in that first season was really about: What is this show? Every sketch we chose had to help us define what the whole point of this thing was. We are doing sketches that could only be done today, things that wouldn't have been relevant several years ago. It's like what you're saying: Racism still exists, and it's ridiculous, but there are still parts of the country where the youth have just a completely different view of race, and we want to bring that conversation into the larger culture.

Key: That's really the biggest, most significant paradigm s.h.i.+ft: Kids don't look at race, they look at culture. I don't think they know that they're looking at culture, but they're co-opting each other's culture and it's starting to mush together, whereas for me or for someone older than me, everything was always about the color of your skin.

Judd: But now it seems like it is a little bit more about cla.s.s?

Key: It does. And when I say culture, I mean cla.s.s. As in, you can afford to be part of a certain culture. For a lot of people, their culture is defined by where they are socioeconomically, and for decades, rich kids have coopted poorer kids' cultures because they were bored or whatever.

Judd: My daughter is at this nice private school, but there are a lot of scholars.h.i.+p students there, too. She says that the school is very aggressive about wanting everyone to hang out with each other. And when they don't, they a.s.sume it's because of race, but she says it's because of cla.s.s, that it's uncomfortable for the kids who aren't living at the same economic level to integrate. And that kids from similar cla.s.s backgrounds tend to hang out together.

Key: Yeah. My wife and I drove out to Riverside yesterday to watch my best friend's oldest son play for his Pop Warner football team. They lost the game by a field goal, and it was a heartbreaker. My friend is from Rancho Palos Verdes and all the kids on the other team were from San Bernardino, and as we were driving home, my wife said, "Well, those kids really need it. Good for them." And I feel that all the way. You know, I'm from Detroit. It doesn't matter when New York City wins a sports champions.h.i.+p. But when Detroit wins a sports champions.h.i.+p, it actually means something. We need the money for infrastructure, we need the boost. This is the same thing. The majority of those kids were African American, and they're from some really bad, downtrodden school district in the Mount Baldy area. It's different than kids from Rancho Palos Verdes. And they're out there, screaming and running around the field and jumping up and down. It means something for them.

Judd: I think it means so much whenever you see somebody that you relate to in whatever way kicking a.s.s and succeeding. I'm so interested in this with the president, and how people look at him.

Key: Yeah, and trying to figure out what box to put him in. You have to understand that if you're going to put him in a box, you should put him in the child-of-a-single-mother, lower-middle-cla.s.s box. That's the box he belongs in. You know, as Jordan has said in the past, I sometimes think we have a show because Obama got elected. That pushed these issues to the forefront, and people have had to address it. What happens when a person's mixed?

Judd: The country's completely mixed, but you still see the last vestiges of some things- Peele: There's such a diversity of experiences, and having a sketch show now has been a great way to explore it all, because there's no single comment to be made that's going to sum it up. Often we'll make a sketch and go, "You know what? You know who's going to love this sketch? Hispanic break dancers are going to love it." And then this one, "This one is for the black people in Ferguson that need this story told as a reminder to everyone else."

Key: Right, that this is going on, and that we know that's going on, and that everybody else needs to know that that's still going on. Whenever people stop to talk to me on the street, I'm always like, "I'm sorry, I'm so curious, you're going to have to tell me what sketch hooked you in. I want to know what demographic you're coming from."

Peele: In the beginning, we really latched on to being biracial as something that made us similar to the president, but also as the thing that made us relevant and hadn't been explored. As the show has gone on and progressed, though, the more important thing is that we're able to tell the stories of anybody. We can get away with going anywhere because we've gone everywhere.

Key: This is so lofty, but it feels like we ended up writing an American show.

Judd: Absolutely. And not just where America is now; it's also where America's going.

Peele: Part of the interesting thing about this whole conversation is the fact that I think we consider ourselves kind of like modern-day jesters. Our job is to be a mirror for everything that's going on, and I think that if people had the sense that we were just purely in the president's pocket or whatever, we'd lose credibility.

Judd: I love that your comedy doesn't seem to come from insecurity or self-hatred. I could be completely wrong-you may hate yourselves-but my sense of humor came from feeling like I was not like all these other people and it sucked. It made me mad at the world. But I don't get the sense that you guys came from the same type of emotional experience. What was the thing that made you funny?

Peele: I think we both had success early on that probably helped us not have a disgruntled vibe. But I think our ability to be chameleons comes from an early sense of ident.i.ty crisis.

Key: I agree. That was our survival mechanism.

Peele: Keegan grew up in Detroit and I grew up in New York, both fairly cosmopolitan places. But we both still lived in a culture where being a black person who sounds white is a recipe for a beating.

Key: I mean, if you go way back-primordial, right-as human beings, we have had to categorize things to stay alive. Eat the brown one, don't eat the green one. So some of that primal stuff kicks in for people and they go, You're not fitting in my box. And that's why you get beaten up, because you scare them and they just happen to be bigger than you and know how to throw a football. But I think for me, humor is definitely borne of the insecurity in being adopted and being biracial and saying, "I just got to figure out what the gig is that will allow me to feel good emotionally and survive the beatings."

Peele: You know, the beauty of a show like Freaks and Geeks is that anybody who is left to create their own ident.i.ty because they don't fit into the "cool" ones, or the ones that are already in place, can get working on this creative business early. All the main characters on Freaks and Geeks would be wildly successful today.

Judd: Yes, they would. The ones that aren't in jail.

Key: Something that has always been positive for me, in our working experience, is that we're trying to figure out that puzzle in different ways. My mom had to keep nudging me and nudging me until she finally kicked me out between the curtains and onto the stage, you know: "That's where you belong!" I was painfully shy in grade school. I was the most well-spoken kid and experienced the most emotion and I was mesmerized by all the school plays-Annie, and G.o.dspell-but my brain said, You can't do that. Why would you think you could do that?

Judd: Who told you you couldn't do it?

Key: n.o.body. This is my pop psychology theory: I had a complete, profound, horrible sense of self because, even as a nine-year-old, you can comprehend the idea of, Why would a woman have a baby and then give the baby away? Why would you do that? There must be something wrong with me. So I could sense how amazing it would make me feel if I got out onstage, but I wasn't allowed to do it because there's clearly something wrong with me. But my mom kept on pus.h.i.+ng. She was pus.h.i.+ng so hard, like, "This is where you belong. You just need the confidence to know that it's going to be okay."

Judd: That's why I stopped doing stand-up for so long. The same psychology: There's no reason why anyone would ever want to listen to me. Then I read somewhere that the best gift you can give other people is your story, and it just hit me, like, Really? That's the whole thing? And then I thought about who I liked, and how they were going about it.

Key: Like with Bill Cosby: all he's done his whole career is tell his story.

Judd: Or part of it!

Peele: Yeah. But I want to get back to being a chameleon: So much effort has been put into becoming other characters and becoming other ident.i.ties. I remember the first time I faced this was when I went to iO [formerly ImprovOlympic] in Chicago, maybe fifteen years ago. And improv is a totally different form. The playing around was fun, but the monologues were so hard. Right before we started doing the show, I tried stand-up for the second time in my life and I realized that if I didn't have a sense of who I am, the show would just be these empty characters-and they wouldn't connect. So I started piecing together a few short bits that exemplified my place in the world, and that was the missing element that is so important and has really helped us in the show. Especially with the car segments. Four years ago, I don't know if I would have had the ability to say, "All right, just be yourself with Keegan. Just do what we would do in a car." And that was such an important lesson.

Judd: I think those segments are more revealing than being in front of a crowd.

Key: For me, the big challenge is that I am still in this place where I care about what other people will think. It reminds me of something you said, Judd, that has been working inside of me: I have life rights. So I'm going to write this character and Albert Brooks is going to play the character and I know it's my dad. And I don't care because I have life rights. It's my story. I'm trying to find a way to install that idea into me.

Judd: That you're allowed to do that.

Key: Right.

Judd: These things also get complicated when you feel abandoned. You worry that if you talk about your life and your family that people will abandon you again.

Key: And how can you navigate that? Yeah, it's tricky. This is why I didn't go into stand-up. When my dad was still alive, I said, "I want to do stand-up like Eddie Murphy. Maybe I could do that." And he was like, "Well all right, but don't tell any jokes about me." He just straight-out said to my face, "Don't tell any jokes about me." n.i.g.g.a, you are the jokes. You're like seventy percent of the jokes!

Judd: I sent my dad the script for This Is 40 and said, "It's fabricated, but it comes out of certain aspects of our relations.h.i.+p." And he said, "Well, as long as he's likable. Just get someone funny to play me." I'm like, "Albert Brooks is doing it." And he's like, "All right."

Key: He signed off on it? That's great.

Judd: What made you think you actually could do comedy as a career? Jordan, you were in New York and went to a nice high school, right?

Peele: Yes, I was at the Calhoun School but I was the artist kid, very quiet. My mother would have never guessed that I would have gotten into this. But when I was ten years old, I saw this play at this place called Tada, a children's theater, and it was amazing. I thought: I have that, I can do that. So I went and auditioned. I sold the f.u.c.k out of this audition. They asked me to sing "Happy Birthday" and I sold it. I got down on my knees and- Judd: You went James Brown on them?

Peele: Total James Brown.

Judd: How old were you?

Peele: Ten. And I got the coolest part in the play and very quickly I realized that I loved doing it. It was like, Okay, I actually have a knack for this, and they saw something in me that was probably just that love of what I was doing coming through. From that point on, I started auditioning for commercials. Didn't get any parts, which disheartened me and left me with this feeling of Maybe I don't really have a place in this. I don't know what I'm selling. It was intense.

Judd: I wanted to do commercials as a kid, too. I got head shots made like in seventh grade but I got the chicken pox and had these terrible scars, and they refused to heal. They were red and full of pus and then I actually shoved poison ivy up my nose to make my friends laugh- Peele: Oh, f.u.c.k.

Judd: So I got poison ivy all over my face, plus the chicken pox, and I didn't know what to do, so I put poison ivy medicine on the chicken pox, which made them blow up like ten times the size-which caused these horrible scars and the pus. And so my dream of acting was over.

Peele: How old were you?

Judd: Between seventh and eighth grade. But that's what I wanted to do, was go out for those Jack in the Box commercials.

Peele: That's a really f.u.c.ked-up time to be selling yourself, too.

Key: The most fragile time.

Peele: I remember one audition I went on, for some kind of fast-food spot. I got in and homeboy was like, "All right, dance." Oh my G.o.d, I busted out and danced. I danced for about sixty seconds. He was like, "All right, great, great, great..." And then you don't get the gig. I just went there and danced on cue.

Judd: Oh my G.o.d. I just found this old tape-a recycled three-quarter-inch tape that I was putting my stand-up act on a long time ago to use for getting gigs and whatever. And apparently it had also been used as the audition tape for a dance party show on MTV. I started watching it and my roommate, Adam Sandler, shows up on the screen. It's his audition! They put music on and he's dancing, walking up to other dancers, asking them questions, dancing the whole time. It was as humiliating an audition as you could ever imagine. "Hey, buddy, where ya from? You like this song? Yeah, I like Tiffany, too."

Key: "I like Tiffany, too." Oh that's awful.

Judd: But how did that-all the early acting stuff and the commercials-lead to becoming aware of improv and Second City?

Peele: For me, that didn't happen until college. I went to high school and did a couple of plays, got into college, Sarah Lawrence. I was interested in theater. My thing was doing puppetry.

Judd: Getting laid a lot?

Peele: Did not get laid as much as I would have liked to. But the need to be liked by girls was a huge motivator. Just to try and make something beautiful because I never had any wild man machismo. I never had any of that s.h.i.+t that the girls like, that X factor. And so.

Key: Well, you have, like, the Beautiful Mind X factor.

Peele: Yeah, but when you're young, that's worth nothing.

Key: When I was fourteen or fifteen, I used to listen to that 1977 compilation SNL ca.s.sette and warped it in my dad's van. Warped it because I just listened to it all the time, and that's how I first found out about sketch comedy. Then I saw an NBC special about, like, the biggest star in the world right now is John Belus.h.i.+, and they showed clips from Neighbors and an old Samurai sketch. And I just started reading about everything John Belus.h.i.+ did, and about how he started at Second City, but it felt like there was no way to get there, you know? There was no conduit. I didn't know about improv until a guy I went to college with at the University of Detroit said, "I'm going to start an improv group called New and Improved," and I said, "I've got to jump in here and audition for this."

Judd: Were you studying theater at all in college?

Key: I was studying theater, yeah, and I did this improv group, went off to graduate school, and then, after graduate school, joined the Second City in Detroit and was there for four years.

Peele: I was hosting at Second City so I was taking cla.s.ses there but really the best thing I did was sit there and watch the main stage.

Judd: Were those the Adam McKayTina Fey years?

Peele: No. This was right after, with Stephnie Weir, Rich Talarico, Kevin Doyle, Susan Messing, Tami Sagher, T. J. JaG.o.dowski-just unbelievable, night after night. It's so important to see the best. That's how you know how good it can be.

Key: And you're like, Can I do that?

Peele: I remember feeling like, Oh no, I can't do that. I just watched some magic right there. It was a gut-wrenching feeling.

Key: So many people have the same journey. I remember being a first-year in graduate school, sitting in the room where we did all these showcases that n.o.body watches but the other students, and the second-years were doing their Greeks final. And it's all like the Trojan women and everybody's been f.u.c.king raped sixty-five times and the husbands have been killed and babies have been chucked off the side of mountains. There was just so much raw emotion taking place in these four actors in front of us. I remember looking at my roommate and another one of my friends and saying, "I'm getting kicked out. I'm getting kicked out of this program. I'm never going to be able to do that." But then you get the tools, and one of those tools is the confidence to say, "Of course I can do that." It was so important for me to be able to get that foundation.

Judd: When I first started doing stand-up, I was watching the highest level of it with Jim Carrey and Sandler and I just thought, I'll never get there. It was almost like it was unfair. It was like if Brando was at your college and you were watching him while you were taking your first acting cla.s.ses.

Peele: One of the breakthrough moments for me was realizing that, you know, you can take all the cla.s.ses you want and learn and practice and get all the advice from other people, but it's really like learning an instrument that has never existed until you were born. No one can tell you how to play that instrument. There's a part of that journey that you have to figure out for yourself.

Key: And then there's putting your own spice on it.

Peele: Yeah. When I moved to Chicago, I was like, All right, I want to be a sketch comedian and my power is going to be in the fact that I'm going to dedicate myself completely. There's not going to be a fallback, you know? I'm going to watch people give up and I'll still be there, learning from it all, and if I stay with it, I'll be successful. That was everything.

Key: Part of Jordan's X factor is that n.o.body out-hustles him. You can try, and you will fail. Which, of course, makes your job easier if you're working with him. So even if you're excelling, he's there taking the pressure off. He's the anchor.

Judd: I always wanted to be that guy, too. Like, no one is going to do more than me. You see so many people who are great but they don't go that last twenty-five percent in effort. It's what Seinfeld talks about, how he just gets up every day and writes for two hours. Every day, he sits alone in a room with a legal pad. And I guarantee you that one percent or less of comedians do that.

Peele: You know, after ten years in Hollywood, you really see the system is set up to sap money from people who are trying to get into the business. It's just set up that way. There's so many things that people are told they must do. You must get representation. I mean, the number of people that sit by idly in this town saying, "I just need to get an agent or a manager," and you're like, "You've been here what, eight years? Dude, just make a show."

Judd: A lot of people ask me, "How do you get people to read your scripts?" And I'll go, "Did you write one?" "No, but I was wondering how you get someone to read one." You know, there's no great script in town sitting in the stack that people don't know about. There's no insanely funny person that can't get attention or get an agent. That's not going to be the hard part.

Key: Yeah. You've got to just do the show first. I mean, that's the way it's always worked.

Judd: So now that the sketch show is ending, do you guys have a vision for the next phase of your career?

Key: Yeah, I mean, in my mind-and I think I have probably said this to Jordan in some form or another-it's almost like, boy, wouldn't it be great if we could be the next Pryor/Wilder? You know, go off and do maybe three projects that fulfill us, and then come home and see each other? I think we have the ability to do that.

Peele: We're never going to have another version of this.