Keegan-Michael Key has a ton of options when it comes to picking a favorite Key & Peele sketch. But he has a clear winner — and Halloween is the time to revisit it.
“It’s such a silly sketch,” Key, 53, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “It’s called MJ Halloween.”
The 2012 sketch, from season 2 of his and co-creator Jordan Peele’s Emmy-winning Comedy Central series, features Key as Noah, a man who shows up at a Halloween party in full Michael Jackson garb. He proceeds to enact the King of Pop’s most famous moves and vocalizations — ad nauseam.
“I’m dressed as Michael Jackson, like ‘Thriller’ Michael Jackson,” recalls Key. “And I just spend the next four minutes — there’s no script, I’m just trying to make Jordan laugh.”
Peele, 45, plays the party host eager to welcome Noah in, until the Jackson impersonator overplays the performance. “I’m just trying to waste time and screw up the takes and do whatever I can to make him laugh,” says the actor with a laugh. “That’s the whole damn sketch.”
And, Key adds, Peele “never breaks!”
The “Michael Jackson” sketch ends with Peele’s annoyed character cutting Key’s Noah off, telling him the impersonation is played out especially years after Jackon’s death in 2009. “He died?” asks Key, lip quivering in dismay. He proceeds to sing “boo-hoo” in Jackson’s voice while moonwalking sadly away.
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“There was something Jordan declared in our first season, that the writing had to be bulletproof,” remembers Key of the sketch show’s evolution. “So if you watch the first seasons of Key & Peele, it’s interesting, you’ll see there’s not a lot of improvising.”
He continues, “We were like, ‘We’ve got to just solidly hit these jokes that are undeniable. Let’s write undeniable jokes and then hit them and use the technical prowess afforded us by our editors and director so that people get hard laughs off of the thing.’ It wasn’t till the second season, third season that [we started to] loosen up and we’d improvise.”
Key as a silly Halloween version of Jackson was one of the sketches that signaled the show’s turning point. From around that time onward, says the Transformers One star, “We wrote some sketches that were just very strange and weird. And it was fun! That was a fun part of the evolution.”
Comedy Central / courtesy Everett
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Although he and Peele “don’t see each other that often anymore, which is to me a tragedy,” says Key, he relishes remembering Key & Peele sketches like that one, as well as the duo’s on-camera breakout on Fox’s Mad TV from 2004 to 2009.
“We shared a creative language the very first time we met,” he says. “When we were on camera, it was alchemy.”
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