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There’s something particularly intimate about that. Key has noted in the past that taking a guaranteed job offer on the L.A.-based
SNL challenger
MadTV represented a pragmatic choice for a young Second City sketch performer, and he certainly made the most of the opportunity offered, especially in his friendship and partnership with Jordan Peele. Their subsequent series,
Key & Peele, was a revelation and a liberation, allowing two of the most fertilely original comic minds in sketch history free rein to express things neither
MadTV nor
SNL would have known what to do with. Not just because of race—although, yeah—but simply because Key and Peele’s sensibilities were uniquely their own. As accomplished as each is in various fields (Key pretended to be offended when an audience plant asked about his Oscar for