What is the best comedy sketch of all time? Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key have an answer

CHICAGO — This isn’t meant to be answered with certainty, but for a moment, ask yourself:

What is the single best comedy sketch of all time?

From any source — Abbot & Costello, Monty Python, “Saturday Night Live,” “Portlandia,” “Chapelle’s Show.” There’s no ruling body on the question, not even a Rolling Stone-esque comedy magazine to claim that authority. But there is a smart married comedy couple, Elle Key and Keegan-Michael Key, actor (him), producer (her), now co-authors of a slender, conversational book, “The History of Sketch Comedy.” And by the end of that history, they try to answer this question, and thus, must go through Chicago.

Key and Key’s pick? Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’s “The Audition,” from HBO’s influential ‘90s series “Mr. Show.” The setup: Cross auditions for Odenkirk (Second City vet, Naperville native) and Dino Stamatopoulos (Columbia College alum, Norridge native) and asks to perform a monologue ironically titled “The Audition.” The problem: every time he seems to address Odenkirk and Stamatopoulos, they politely reply and Cross must stop — no, no, that’s a part of his monologue. Ahh ... OK, start again. But as Cross’ monologue grows increasingly furious — “Someone answer me! Don’t look at each other! Look at me!” — Odenkirk and Stamatopoulos squirm, unsure if they should respond to this actor who is auditioning by pretending — maybe? — to be in an audition.

In their book, Keegan describes the sketch as the “pinnacle of sketch ... my turducken.” On the phone recently, in advance of Key and Key’s appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival, they explained: That sketch is “everything you should do,” Elle said. It rises in intensity, it’s built on improv’s yes-anding and the end is unexpected.

Also, they agree.

In fact, to discuss comedy with Key and Key can sound vaguely like a sketch:

"So you both agree on comedy and what the history of comedy should look like?"

Elle: “There was a moment when Keegan was presenting at an award show and I wrote him something and had him stop for laughs — he was on video, waiting for the audience’s reaction as if it were live — and he did fight me on that, because he did not think it would get the laugh I knew he would get. But I can’t think of another time when we disagreed ...”

Keegan: “Neither can I.”

Elle: “See, he can’t disagree with me now.”

They have been married five years. She’s from New York City; he’s from Detroit. They spoke from New York, where, as Elle explained, by way of describing her husband: “Keegan jaywalked today. I think that’s huge. I can count on one hand how many times he’s jaywalked in New York City, and I don’t think if I wasn’t with him that he would do it.”

Keegan — whose own contribution to sketch comedy, as half of the duo Key & Peele, would need inclusion in any serious discussion of the funniest sketches ever — keeps a kind of proper, formal bearing in everyday life that serves his sketch characters well. He knows instinctively where a sketch needs to veer out of control, and where it needs a beat of silence. He came up through the Second City ecosystem, first in its satellite Detroit troupe, then through Second City’s e.t.c. cast in Chicago. “There was definitely a difference of styles,” he said. “Detroit was extremely physical and very raw, and there was something much headier about the Chicago stage. That was my experience when I came over from Detroit. Someone in Chicago told me the majority of people in the audience there, for a long time, came from the 60614 ZIP code. They had been trained to watch this kind of sketch. Now there’s more tourism. In Detroit, there was not yet an educated improv or sketch audience, so when we did big physical humor or marriage humor, that was most successful. In Chicago, you could get away with experimenting.”

Not that physical chaos is any less fine-tuned.

I asked what the best sketch shows of the moment are and he said, without pause: HBO’s “Black Lady Sketch Show” — whose breakout Robin Thede went through Northwestern University then Second City — and Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave,” co-created by Detroit native and Chicago Second City star Tim Robinson. The latter, in particular, “strikes me as a descendant of the Marx Brothers,” Keegan said. “I think of Harpo pulling things out of a coat that wouldn’t have existed in a coat, and Tim does that same thing by utilizing minutiae. He finds something 99% of humanity would let go and that’s what his characters give their attention to. The Marx Brothers worked that way. They would stop a plot — however loose that plot was — to be madmen. My favorite moments are when they take a second to just revel in a joke they just told. You could never do that in a movie today, but Tim does. He relishes in obsessing over something small.”

Throughout the book, Key and Key admire chaos, the sort that pairs well with another hallmark of sketch: one-upmanship. A few examples referenced in the book: Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball as competing car salespersons; the legendary parrot sketch from Monty Python; and a great “Kids in the Hall” routine in which two friends have lunch and one tries to remember the name of the movie he saw last night, which is obviously “Citizen Kane.” (“No, that’s not it,” Dave Foley says to every reminder of “Citizen Kane.”)

“Key & Peele,” the remarkable sketch comedy show that Keegan made with Jordan Peele for five seasons on Comedy Central, often basked in this type of gamesmanship, raising the stakes, and raising the stakes, and raising the stakes. Elle and Keegan like to talk the math of such sketches. As she put it — “How you start at 6 then bring it to 412. Some sketches, the scenario will build so much, someone will have to explode.”

“I have been in some of those,” Keegan said.

“Wait, you have?” Elle said.

“Yeah, ‘Key & Peele,’ the valets — they self-immolate. They get carried away.”

Don’t forget, I said, the one with the burger at the BBQ.

“Burger?” Keegan asked.

You’re hovering over Peele, telling him to flip the burger, don’t use cheese ...

“Oh! The Kobe beef sketch.”

“Right — ‘This meat came all the way over the Pacific! By boat!’”

“That came from my point of view, only heightened,” Keegan said. “In real life, I wouldn’t bring Kobe beef to a cookout. But if I did, what’s the worst possible thing that would happen? It’d end up in the hands of someone who would not honor the product! Why would I want you cooking my food? ‘You’re not worthy! You’re not worthy!’ That’s me.”

One-upmanship and ego is so baked into vintage sketch even sketches rooted in less myopic topics are still about one-upmanship. The slave auction sketch on “Key & Peele” — in which two slaves, played by Key and Peele, grow outraged that they are not selling — is really about “vanity,” Elle said. “Everyone calls it the slave sketch,” Keegan added, “but that’s just the angle. That’s Jordan sitting in his apartment and going, ‘How can I make someone laugh at this?’” Same with their racist zombie sketch — in which Key and Peele, survivors of a zombie apocalypse, pick up on undead microaggressions. To pull it off as comedy, Keegan said, “you have to be willing to say, ‘I’m not just going to be contrarian for shock value but locate a kernel to exploit — then heighten, heighten ...”

There’s patience in sketch comedy that can feel old-school in an age of social media. When a “Key & Peele” or “SNL” or SCTV classic comes across my TikTok or Instagram feed these days, it’s nearly always drained of context and chopped up so much the comedy isn’t allowed room to heighten. Chaos doesn’t have to arrive. It’s already there.

Key and Key call this “DMV Theater,” and it’s a mixed bag: Sketch comedy is so ubiquitous online, it’s thriving. Yet, it’s consumed on the run, in blinks of boredom.

“Kevin Nealon told us in the book that his son will watch ‘SNL’ sketches on YouTube but check the time stamp first,” Keegan said. “What’s fascinating is how older sketches wait for the setup. They simmer. You could have two minutes before you get to the comedy.

“(‘Key & Peele’) never looked at it as being online someday. We orchestrated sketches to live together. We didn’t know they’d get segmented out. Episodes were like albums, where there is a movement to the show, and one thing leads into the next for a reason.”

Python pioneered that, I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s how those sketches were designed, You ever heard the theory that every episode of that series was a dream in the head of a man named Monty Python? You had these incongruous sketches flowing — literally, and now for something completely different. It’s how we dream. It’s probably an apocryphal story, but I love it.”