KEEGAN-MICHAEL
KEY

Keegan-Michael Key’s comedy career has a theatre foundation: he earned an MFA in theatre at Penn State in 1996. Born in Southfield, Michigan, on 22 March 1971, he later became familiar to television audiences through MADtv and Key & Peele. The training and the comedy belong to the same working life. A performer has to establish what a character wants before the audience can enjoy how badly the pursuit goes wrong.

Key and Jordan Peele moved from the MADtv ensemble into their own sketch series, which began in 2012 and ran for five seasons. In 2016, Key shared the Emmy for outstanding variety sketch series as an executive producer of Key & Peele. This was a programme award. His work on the show also includes performing and writing, making the collaboration broader than a succession of on-screen comic characters.

FLM.RED’s reading of a sketch performance follows the moment a shared rule breaks down. Someone thinks he is being reasonable, while the person answering him discovers that the conversation has become impossible. The joke depends on commitment as much as exaggeration. Key’s changes in posture, volume and pace can make a character’s logic legible even when that logic is carrying everyone further from an ordinary exchange.

As Toad in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, his performance takes another form through voice and animation. A SYFY interview reported his description of the character as an eager participant in the Mushroom Kingdom’s adventures. For a viewer, that gives a practical listening point: enthusiasm can be shaped through rhythm and a sudden emphasis as well as through the animated figure’s movement. The films below are the current FLM.RED collection, not a complete account of his career.