Goofy suits Key & Peele. I laughed more at this episode than I have in a few weeks, and it was all so goofy. The premises involve an embarrassing laugh, a presumed affair with a dog, and an excitable masseur. The talk is about nimrods, a story about slipping on a banana peel, looking for a human’s missing rhino horns. The names are Exquisite T and Mr. McFluffytail. A twentysomething who has embarrassed himself in front of his friends has a convenient hobo bindle that lets him wander the earth from friend group to friend group. There’s Peele’s silent laugh-dance that “looked like a worm on crack,” Key wrestling with a stuffed dog followed by the actual dog sauntering across the room unscathed, and Peele’s vaudeville stalling at his wife’s deathbed. The most serious this episode gets is when the melting pot bubbles over in a small-town Albanian-Macedonian restaurant rivalry. Like I said, this is a thoroughly silly episode.
The funniest moment: I probably laughed hardest when the dog pounces on Key, complete with the perfect sound effects. Everything else about the sketch fits together without that moment. Key’s wife and Peele are having an affair. Key thinks she’s sleeping with a dog, because he found a dog toy in the laundry room. That’s because Peele brings his dog over and has to keep him occupied during their trysts. There is no reason for that tiny dog to Yoda-attack Key, but it’s such a funny surprise when he does.
The funniest sketch: Overall, though, while I love Peele stalling at his wife’s deathbed—“Chickadee-check…yo comprende…your request has been filed”—the funniest sketch is the Macedonian restaurant where they cook kebapi, not like those sons-of-fuckers at the Albanian restaurant across the street who serve ćevapi. The “kebapi” pronunciation montage, with its inappropriate touching and peekaboo gestures, is a delight, as is Key and Peele switching places for the Albanian restaurant. It’s like a funny version of Star Trek’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” the one with the race who are black on one side of their body and white on the other hating the race who are the exact same but opposite. Yes, the English-as-a-second-language jokes are easy, but the phrasing has clearly been fine-tuned for maximum comedy: “My friends, I like to apologize for the behavior of my passion. I just feel bad in my brain for people to think that your mouths will have been raped by the food that they serving at these Albanian mother-bitches.” And dude nailed his future perfect tense, so who are we to complain about his vocabulary?
The weakest sketch: The football concussion sketch, partly because it’s hard to hear the jokes through all that production and partly because the jokes aren’t all that funny to begin with. The parody elements are spot-on, though, and get a load of that ending. The concussed Rhinos quarterback wanders off looking for his rhino horn, and one frustrated player wheels around in an almost silhouetted profile and just says, “Fuck.”