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    ‘Migration’ Review: Is It a Road Trip if You Have Wings?

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    An animated feature written by Mike White (“The White Lotus”) stars Awkwafina, Elizabeth Banks and Kumail Nanjiani as birds, but it never fully gets off the ground.Classic cartoon wisdom deems that ducks are brash and brazen creatures. See Donald and Daffy, ill-tempered anthropomorphic animals who aren’t afraid of making a display of their displeasure.Mack Mallard, the waterfowl patriarch voiced by Kumail Nanjiani in the animated family picture “Migration,” is not exactly a shy bird himself. He displays a rapid-fire volubility when telling his kids a bedtime story at the movie’s opening. But he’s very timid in one respect. The emphatic point of the bedtime story is: Never leave the pond. It’s the only place that’s safe.But when his kids, Dax and Gwen, encounter a flock flying from their home in upstate New York to Jamaica for the winter, Mack’s wife, Pam (Elizabeth Banks), takes the kids’ side.Even when the highways are in the sky, it’s not an American comedic road trip without a crusty older relative coming along for the ride, and this is where Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito) comes in. The Mallards spend a lot of time trying to avoid being eaten, first by a couple of grotesque herons, and then in a Manhattan restaurant run by a thoroughly obnoxious chef.The movie was directed by Benjamin Renner, but the dominant artistic voice is that of the screenwriter Mike White, the creator of the satirical HBO series “The White Lotus.” White is vegan, which explains the insistent meat-is-murder angle throughout, although considering that “Lotus” is so disdainful of tourism, the perspective on travel here may be surprising. The stellar voice cast also includes Awkwafina as a tough New York City pigeon and Keegan-Michael Key as a captive parrot.This Illumination-produced feature is preceded by a “Minions”-adjacent short called “Mooned,” which overexerts itself trying to approximate a vintage Looney Tunes gag-fest. In the end, “Migration” moves along at jet speed while often feeling labored.MigrationRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wendell and Wild’ Review: Not Wild Enough

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      This devilish stop-motion horror comedy from Henry Selick and Jordan Peele can’t quite breathe life into its narrative.Why not try to resurrect the dead? Collect some demons in glass jars? Or summon a pair of demon brothers from among the “souls of the danged”? These seem like the ingredients for a wicked fun time.But the devilish new stop-motion horror comedy from Netflix, “Wendell & Wild,” can’t get these pieces to double, double, toil or trouble into a cohesive dish of entertainment.In the film, directed by Henry Selick, and written by Selick and Jordan Peele, a demon named Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and his brother, Wild (Peele), aim to hitch a ride up to the land of the living with the help of Kat (Lyric Ross), a teenage girl with a traumatic back story and a boombox called the Cyclops. Wendell and Wild hope to find a way to build an amusement park in the underworld that would put Six Flags to shame. However, Kat has her own plan for the demon siblings, and the repercussions soon spread to affect the whole town.From juicy grubs to booger sculptures to sticky gelatinous goo, “Wendell & Wild” exhibits the same charming, if grotesque, ghoulishness and delectable phantasmagoria of Selick’s other Halloween classics, like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009).Key and Peele’s usually unstoppable humor and Selick’s signature combination of morbid terror and fanciful play, along with the film’s wonderfully diverse characters (including an Indigenous woman and a transgender boy of color) and its surprising sociopolitical messaging, seem like they’ll combine to make “Wendell & Wild” a new Halloween fave.But the story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.Every new character and narrative detail in the film — a mysterious janitor, a demonic teddy bear and a carnival of imps and fiends — is an unintentional red herring, not a purposeful misdirection but a residual of all the interesting places this film could have gone but never ventured.It’s especially disappointing given the ways “Wendell & Wild” does succeed — the imaginative visuals and playful character designs, of course, and an interesting protagonist in Kat, a Black punk girl with eyebrow piercings, green hair (about 160 hand-curled strands of wool, according to the press notes, to replicate her natural hair) and no-nonsense platform boots. And then there’s the headbanging array of tunes from Death, TV on the Radio and X-Ray Spex.You’d think demons would have the most fun. And yet, despite the countless courses “Wendell & Wild” could have taken, the route it does choose is, unfortunately, a dead end.Wendell & WildRated PG-13 for demons, zombies and things that go bump in the night. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      In ‘Reboot,’ Everything Old Is New, to Streaming

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      This new Hulu comedy pokes fun at TV’s obsession with bringing back past shows.At a recent meeting at Hulu’s offices, over coffee and luxury bottled water, half a dozen executives entertained a pitch for a new series. Well, not exactly new. The idea: Reboot the beloved early ’00s comedy about a blended family, “Step Right Up.” Though it ended abruptly after its lead departed, the show has, surprisingly, found a robust audience on streaming, particularly among, an analytics specialist notes, the family and “live-to-laugh” quadrants.“Are we sure that’s not just people leaving it on for their dogs?” a colleague asks.Her boss voices a further concern: Are reboots still a thing? His team answers him with a very long list, which includes “Fuller House,” “How I Met Your Father,” “Veronica Mars,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Gossip Girls,” “The Wonder Years,” “Party of Five,” “Party Down” and on and on and on.“What the hell,” the boss says, convinced. “Let’s remake something original.”This is the opening scene of “Reboot,” a Hulu half-hour comedy from the showrunner Steven Levitan (“Modern Family,” “Just Shoot Me!”) with a premise so flawless it seems bananas that no one has thought of it before. A turducken of a show, it features a multicamera family comedy, nested inside a single camera workplace comedy, shoved into a behind-the-scenes Hollywood spoof. The series is also a referendum — a pretty fun one — on the way that the sitcom has advanced in the past several decades and its migration from network to cable and streaming.“This really is an affectionate look at our business,” Levitan said, speaking from a home office with “Modern Family” cutouts in the background. “The bizarre characters, the weird situations, the important meetings you have over something that’s unbelievably trivial and embarrassing. It’s really such great fodder for comedy.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” several years ago when “Roseanne” returned and then disappeared, following a racist tweet posted by its star, Roseanne Barr, and then returned again, sans Barr, as “The Conners.” The presumed backstage drama intrigued him.“I remember thinking to myself, Well, that’s the show I want to watch,” he said. “Modern Family” still had a few seasons to go. He assumed that someone else would dream up the same idea in the meantime, but no one did. Or no one was greenlit, anyway. So he took his pitch to Hulu. (He has an overall deal with 20th Television, which is, like Hulu, part of the Walt Disney Company.)Rachel Bloom, left, and Krista Marie Yu in “Reboot,” a show about a show reviving an old show.Michael Desmond/HuluI asked Karey Burke, the president of 20th Television, who helped to develop “Reboot,” if Hulu’s real-life executives had ever expressed any qualms about the show’s satire. (There’s a dazzling swipe at “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the pilot, for example.)“They love it,” she said. “And I don’t know that other platforms would be able to handle the zingers as gracefully as they have.”Craig Erwich, the president of ABC Entertainment, Hulu and Disney branded television streaming originals, confirmed this, saying that he and his real colleagues enjoyed being in on the joke. “We loved it,” he said. “It’s funny. And it’s funny because it probably rings true.”Not all of these jokes target streaming services. A bunch take aim at networks, where Levitan spent most of his career. Others go after changes within the form of the sitcom itself. Many of these last are voiced in the form of arguments between Paul Reiser’s Gordon, who created “Step Right Up,” and Rachel Bloom’s Hannah, the millennial writer-director who pitched the reboot.“Comedy has evolved since you last wrote for television,” says Hannah, tartly. “I mean, honestly, whole species have evolved.”Some of that evolution has pushed sitcoms away from the live-audience multicamera style, the province of a studio comedy like “Step Right Up,” to more visually sophisticated single-camera formats. The move from network to streaming, a move that “Reboot” explores, has wrought other changes. This new “Step Right Up” no longer need to adhere to a 22-minute format with A, B and C story lines and pauses for commercial breaks. More sexually explicit material is now permissible, as are obscenities.“It’s the world of sitcom, but it’s streaming,” Reiser said in an interview, speaking of the move to streaming generally. “So you can say whatever you want, and you’re not going for the laugh, necessarily.”But old constraints die hard. Though “Step Right Up” has taken on a new look, most of the episodes of “Reboot” do still honor a three-act structure. And if the set-up-punchline, set-up-punchline form has given ground, A, B and C plots remain. “It’s inherent,” Levitan said. “It’s baked into my bones right now that shows will have a certain sense of structure and plot.”And yet, as “Reboot” demonstrates, and as a rewatch of most ’80s, ’90s and ’00s comedies will prove, content has changed. Jokes that punched down at women, queer people, disabled people, people of color — rarely make it to air now. Levitan framed this as a limitation, if a good one.“The whole #MeToo, woke culture, it has changed where you can go, and by and large, in a positive way,” he said. “Where it gets tricky is when everybody is so scared of offending somebody that you don’t even go anywhere near the line anymore.”Bloom, who cocreated the sitcom “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” sees this new sensibility as an opportunity rather than a curb or a cause for angst. “There’s a mindfulness that’s being asked of people now that wasn’t being asked of people before,” she said. “I think it’s making us all better people, better comedians.” And she enjoys playing Hannah, even in her occasional humorlessness.“A girl who wears baggy sweaters with anxiety?” Bloom said. “I know that person.” Reiser, who described himself as “a little bit more aware than Gordon” agreed with his co-star. “I never understand people who say, ‘You couldn’t make that joke anymore,’” he said. “I go, ‘Why would you want to? How much do you want to make a joke?’ It’s kind of not cool and insensitive.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” during the controversy in which Roseanne Barr was fired from her own revived sitcom.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesSome of the strongest scenes of “Reboot” are the ones set in the writers’ room that dramatize this tension. The writers whom Hannah has hired — a queer man and two women of color — clash openly with the older Jewish writers of Gordon’s acquaintance. In one scene, a younger writer critiques a joke pitched by the TV veteran Selma (Rose Abdoo, the series’s stealth M.V.P.).“I thought gay people were supposed to be fun,” Selma snaps back. But eventually they find a joke everyone likes. It involves a pratfall. Pratfalls are funny no matter what.But “Reboot” isn’t only funny. There’s a persistent sweetness to it and a sense that people can change, usually for the better.“That’s something that’s quite thrilling about the show,” said Keegan-Michael Key, a “Step Right Up” star. “It’s a Steve Levitan hallmark, isn’t it, that sense of people being open?”“Step Right Up” is the reboot at the center, but nearly all of the characters are rebooting themselves in one way or another, recovering from divorce, addiction, regional theater. Levitan mentioned how fans had told him how “Modern Family” had helped them work through difficult moments in their own lives. He hopes that “Reboot,” a show about Hollywood elites with Bentleys and real estate portfolios and connections to Nordic royalty, can do the same.“Bringing a little laughter into people’s lives is a really joyous thing to do,” he said.“Reboot” remains agnostic on the question of the worth of reboots themselves. Many real-world ones seem like little more than cheap intellectual-property grabs, and few improve on the original. Some are so dismal that they actually poison their predecessors, retroactively. The creators and stars of “Reboot” had varying opinions on the form. Or no opinion at all.“I don’t think that’s for me to say,” Levitan said. “Yeah, I would rather not draw the ire of comedy writers.” Reiser survived the reboot of “Mad About You” pretty much intact and seemed optimistic about the form. Bloom was less so.“The most exciting part of a reboot for me is the headline of a reboot coming up,” she said. The reboot itself was usually a disappointment.Key sounded more hopeful. He thought that reboots might work, at least notionally, and could even be innovative if the animating idea were persuasive enough. “I really think that is possible,” he said. “It’s all about angles.”Until Hollywood figures out those angles, we’ll just have to make do with something original. Like “Reboot.” More

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      ‘The Bubble’ Review: Swabs, Camera, Action

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      Judd Apatow’s new film is a comedy about actors trying to make a dinosaur movie during the pandemic that plays more like a documentary of actors trying to make a Covid comedy.“The safest place in the world right now is a film set,” an agent (Rob Delaney) tells his actress client Carol (Karen Gillan) to encourage her to join the quarantined production of “Cliff Beasts 6.” “The Bubble,” a new comedy from Judd Apatow, tells the story of how the stars of this apparently long-running dinosaur franchise spent their pandemic while doubling as a sort of documentary about how Apatow, who wrote the screenplay with Pam Brady, spent his.Carol, who skipped “Cliff Beasts 5” and stretched herself by playing a half-Israeli, half-Palestinian space-alien fighter, is being edged out as the series’ youth appeal by a TikTok sensation (Iris Apatow). Their fellow stars and bubble occupants include Keegan-Michael Key as an actor trying to build a lifestyle brand, Leslie Mann and David Duchovny as ex-spouses who can’t keep their hands off each other and Pedro Pascal as a drugged-out playboy with designs on a hotel employee (an underused Maria Bakalova, from the “Borat” sequel).Ask those real-life actors (and these characters) to work together under strict Covid protocols, and it would be hard not to get some laughs. Gillan’s escalating exasperation is especially funny.But elements that have the potential to become running gags — the prospect of forced re-isolation when a crew member tests positive, a rash not of Covid but of the flu, a mysterious security chief (Ross Lee) who uses violence to prevent escapes — either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals). And the Hollywood satire, with Fred Armisen as the Home Depot employee turned Sundance darling hired to direct “Cliff Beasts 6,” is not just safe. It’s airless.The BubbleRated R. Drugs, sex, violence — life on a film set. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Review: ‘Schmigadoon!’ Has a Song in Its Heart, and Everywhere Else

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      The Apple TV+ series both mocks and embraces the glories of classic musicals like “Brigadoon,” “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel.”Welcome to Schmigadoon, “where the men are men, and the cows are cows,” a magical musical land where Melissa and Josh (Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key) find themselves stranded during a trip meant to rehabilitate their romance. At first they think it’s like Colonial Williamsburg, or a warped Disney experience, but they quickly buy into their new reality: They’re trapped in this wholesome, old-timey parallel universe until they learn the lessons about true love it is meant to impart. More

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      'Schmigadoon!' Is an Ode to Broadway Musicals, and Pokes Fun At Them Too

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      One would think that everyone involved in the parody series “Schmigadoon!” was in love with the sometimes hokey, sometimes magical musical genre. Not quite.The director Barry Sonnenfeld has never been a theater guy.“I am not a fan of Broadway musicals,” he grumped affably over the phone. “I’m not a fan of filmed musicals. I don’t understand why people would stop talking and start singing.”So Sonnenfeld, who is best known for the “Men in Black” movies, was a curious choice to direct the new Apple TV+ comedy “Schmigadoon!,” a series whose very title screams musical theater spoof.The showrunner, Cinco Paul, a fan of Sonnenfeld’s work on the highly stylized and intermittently musical cult series “Pushing Daisies,” was unaware of the director’s aversion until they were shooting last fall, mid-pandemic, in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a blockbuster cast filled with Broadway stars.“Here we are on the set,” Paul recalled, “and he’s half jokingly saying, ‘Why are there so many songs?’”If you count reprises, they number nearly two dozen — composed by Paul, who created the show with Ken Daurio — spread over six half-hour episodes that air starting July 16.An affectionate, knowing sendup of classic American musicals, “Schmigadoon!” stars Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live” and Keegan-Michael Key, lately of Netflix’s “The Prom,” as a contemporary couple in a stagnating relationship. On a backpacking trip, they stumble into a frozen-in-time, trapped-in-a-musical town called Schmigadoon, which they can’t escape until they find true love.Paul, who grew up on his mother’s Broadway cast recordings and played piano for musicals as an undergraduate at Yale, said he came up with the kernel of “Schmigadoon!” almost 25 years ago. Not knowing what to do with the idea, he put it away until Andrew Singer at Lorne Michaels’s production company, Broadway Video, mentioned their interest in musicals a few years ago. A match was made.According to Strong, Michaels is — like her — “a musical dork.” And the show brought on stage-savvy writers, including Julie Klausner (“Difficult People”) and Strong’s fellow “S.N.L.” star Bowen Yang.In Schmigadoon, the locals include the sweet, melancholy Mayor Aloysius Menlove, played by the Tony Award winner Alan Cumming; the moral scourge, Mildred Layton, played by the Tony winner Kristin Chenoweth; and the handsome carny Danny Bailey, played by Aaron Tveit, who got news of his Tony nomination for “Moulin Rouge!” during the series shoot. Other boldface names from Broadway include Jane Krakowski, Ann Harada and Ariana DeBose.Recently, Paul, Sonnenfeld and members of the cast spoke separately by phone about “Schmigadoon!” and their affinity, or lack thereof, for musicals. These are edited excerpts from those interviews.“Musicals are charming, and they’re so entertaining, but they’re also sometimes dumb, and sometimes they’re problematic,” said the series co-creator Cinco Paul.Adam Amengual for The New York TimesCINCO PAUL I wanted real musical theater people. I wanted people who did eight shows a week and had those chops, because I wanted everybody to do their own singing, and I wanted to capture that singing live on set to the extent it was possible. The amount of talent we were able to get was phenomenal and was unfortunately because they weren’t able to work anywhere — because theaters were shut down. In many cases, the parts were written for these actors.BARRY SONNENFELD When I interviewed for the job, I said: “Look, here’s the thing. I want to shoot this entirely onstage and I want to shoot it in Vancouver because Vancouver has really great stages and really good crews, and it’s also cheaper.” What was surreal and wonderful was that Vancouver was the only film center that was open when we shot. L.A. was shut down. New York was shut down.CECILY STRONG We had to go shoot our “S.N.L.” intros right before I left for Vancouver. It’s like, you’re around New York and you’re seeing all these theaters shuttered. It’s a little devastating. More

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      Keegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a Laugh

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKeegan-Michael Key Will Do Anything for a LaughHis new 10-part podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” is a surprising and earnest defense of a relatively unsung art form.Keegan-Michael Key in 2018. His new podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” involved a lot of research. “I loved school,” he said, so delving into a subject “kind of lights my fire.”Credit…Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 4:33 p.m. ETThere are people who enjoy comedy, people who are nerdy about comedy and then there is Keegan-Michael Key, an actor and producer whose deep and affectionate connoisseurship of jokes puts him closer to the realm of a jurist or sommelier.On Key’s new Audible-exclusive podcast, “The History of Sketch Comedy,” he plays resident historian, taking listeners on a laugh-laden and discursive journey — from ancient Sumer to 16th-century Rome to Abbott and Costello — in a lighthearted but earnest attempt to demonstrate the enduring power and understated complexity of the art form.For Key, who has spent the half-decade since the end of his award-winning TV show “Key & Peele” zigzagging between interesting projects onscreen and off, the podcast was a labor of love. It was directed by and co-written with his wife, Elle Key, last year. On a recent phone call, he discussed the impetus for the show, performing without a true audience and the role his adoption played in his love of comedy.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you hear about a celebrity starting a podcast, you generally think of something personality driven, or an interview show with other famous people. You don’t think of an in-depth, 10-part history lesson. What made you want to do this project as a podcast?KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY Well, one of the things that brought me and my wife, Elle, together is our love of humor and of comedy, even the science of it: What makes a good turn? What makes the joke work? I’m an academically minded person — I loved school. So being able to do research and delve into a subject and turn that around and share with other people is something that kind of lights my fire. For years, Elle has been suggesting that with all of the combined knowledge and passion for this art form that we have, we should figure out a way to share it with others. And when the pandemic started, we used all of our time in quarantine to put it together. Her pitch to Audible was: “If Keegan-Michael Key was a guest lecturer at N.Y.U. doing a 10-week course called ‘The History of Sketch Comedy,’ it would be a very popular class.”Have you always been a student of the history of sketch comedy?KEY That’s something that started in my 20s probably, when I was an undergrad fine arts and acting major [at the University of Detroit Mercy]. I never gave much thought to the history of comedy until I started studying commedia dell’arte. I was like, “Wait a second, you mean there are archetypes? Warner Brothers didn’t just invent the phenomenon of Bugs Bunny? The primary characteristics [of Bugs] have existed for hundreds of years?” When my professor said that, my mind got peeled back. I wrote a paper [in graduate school, at Pennsylvania State University] making a comparison between vaudevillian poster advertisements from the late 19th century and the images that you would see on Greek and Roman friezes from the comedies of Plautus and Terence and Aristophanes, just because that kind of stuff fascinated me.Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key, who directed the podcast, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party last year.Credit…Danny Moloshok/ReutersHad you done much comedy of your own at that point?KEY Yeah, I think comedy afforded me social currency. You don’t have to be particularly athletic, you don’t have to be super strong and you don’t have to be on the dean’s list to be able to execute a pratfall or tell a funny joke or do a dead-on impression. That was the route that I went as a painfully shy, very skinny kid. That was the only power I knew how to wield. I remember once, when I was a kid, seeing my father, who was this very large, stoic, soft-spoken guy, guffawing at this impression. It was revelatory to me that a person could have that kind of power over somebody who was a thousand miles away, or 10,000 miles away.Did you try and make him laugh yourself?KEY I would try to impress him. If I had gone to see a movie, I would go home to my mom and my dad and act out the movie. Or, if they hadn’t seen a trailer for a movie, I would act out the trailer. Sometimes I would also use that as a kind of pre-Power Point presentation, trying to convince them to let me go see the movie if it was rated R. They were thoroughly entertained, but alas, it did not work.That’s really funny given what you ended up doing for a living, especially all the movie-inspired sketches of the “Key & Peele” show.KEY Exactly. It’s not a surprise at all. Also, I’m adopted; so to say that I spent a lot of time trying to get my parents’ approval is kind of an understatement. I’ve been acting since I was born, you know what I mean? I’ve been putting my tap shoes on for people’s approval for a long time.You chose an interesting starting point for the show, going all the way back to a Sumerian fart joke from 1900 B.C., which I couldn’t believe was real. How did you decide how far back to go?KEY It started with the joke from the film “Airplane.” Lloyd Bridges storms in and he goes: “All right, everybody. I need this piece of information. I need that to happen over there, this to happen over here, and we have to start at the beginning.” And then the guy says to him: “OK. Well, first, there was dinosaurs, and then …” So we actually decided to use that joke as the basis for the beginning. Like, “What would it look like if we start at the beginning? Let’s talk about hieroglyphics.” And then the hieroglyphics brought us to the Sumerians. I think, at our most basic level, the way we captivate each other as human beings is through explaining the journey or the ordeal that one goes through. Literature, cinema, theater — they’re all basically the same at the core, but we express them in a different way.The series begs the question of just what is a sketch. I’m curious how you define it.KEY I think one of the biggest components of sketch is brevity. The modern definition is: premise plus escalation equals sketch, or premise plus escalation equals comedy, which means that a sketch is just kind of an elongated joke that builds on itself. So I was trying to affix that measuring stick to these other pieces of art throughout history. There are lots of scenes in movies and plays where you could move it surgically out of the larger piece, and it could stand as its own piece of comedy. To me, that’s sketch.How did you approach doing all the research for the show? Did you have to brush up on your William Dunlap or your Mathurine de Vallois?KEY Well, a lot of what Elle did is that, as we were putting the structure together, we started to go through history and just say, “What do we know about comedy and where there were comedic performers in history?” Then we just started putting them on the timeline. I discovered through our research about female jesters — was not aware that they existed. There are a lot of wonderful things that I discovered, like the “rural purge” and Beyond the Fringe.Putting all that on a timeline and then being able to kind of zoom out, did it make you see comedy in a different way? Or affirm things you already knew?KEY I think that it probably affirmed things. One of those affirmations was the basics: that people figured out tens of thousands of years ago that it was satisfying to watch someone overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. That is somehow inherent in our programming, to excite us and bring us meaning.Yours is the only voice we hear in the series, and you act out a lot of the sketches you discuss. Was it strange to perform without an audience?KEY Technically speaking, I wasn’t alone: I had Elle in the booth, the engineer and a production assistant. I’d be in the booth looking at them [while performing], and I’d see them start to smile. To me, if I start improvising and I see people start to grin, that’s chum in the water and I’m a great white shark. I’m going to go right the [expletive] off script and do everything in my power to make them burst out in laughter. In certain episodes, you actually hear me talking to Cameron [Perry], the engineer. I go, “Right, Cameron? I mean, it’s a pretty filthy joke, but you’re laughing. Everybody, Cameron’s laughing.”What have you liked most about working in audio?KEY One thing I like is the fact that sometimes it allows you to go bigger. It allows you to be broader, more energetic, because you have to convey something through a microphone. Especially when you’re doing animation work — the figure of what you’re performing with your voice is often so exaggerated that it gives you license to be peculiar or over the top. You can say to the director, “What if I just was like [yodels loudly and cartoonishly]?” And the director will go: “That might work.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      On Keegan-Michael Key’s Podcast, a Provocative Case for Sketch Comedy

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn ComedyOn Keegan-Michael Key’s Podcast, a Provocative Case for Sketch ComedyThe 10-part series mixes history, memoir, analysis and performance to show how classic scenes can be revived just as classic theater is.Keegan-Michael Key as a substitute teacher in a sketch from “Key & Peele.”Credit…Comedy CentralJan. 27, 2021Updated 5:18 p.m. ETWhat if the most impressive post-sketch show career belongs to Key, not Peele?Sure, it’s a hot take, but hear me out. Jordan Peele followed the Comedy Central hit “Key & Peele” by merely becoming one of the greatest film auteurs of his generation, whereas his partner, Keegan-Michael Key, took a more varied route, stealing scenes in “Hamlet” at the Public Theater and improvising bits on Broadway, singing in a movie musical, starring in a comedy series, doing prolific voice work in blockbuster movies, hosting a game show and being an absolutely stellar talk-show guest (his conversations with Conan O’Brien are hilarious). Measured by diversity of work and bounty of laughs, Key stacks up well, particularly after his new project, the Audible podcast series “The History of Sketch Comedy,” is released on Thursday.The title doesn’t do it justice. Directed and co-written with his wife, Elle Key, “The History of Sketch Comedy” is far more eccentric, funny and personal than an Intro to Comedy class, although it is that, too. His 10 half-hour or so episodes cover thousands of years from the ancient Sumerians (who kicked comedy off with a fart joke) right up to Tim Robinson’s Netflix show “I Think You Should Leave.”But this comedy nerd history is filtered through memoir, with Key relating stories of his budding fandom, training and rise from improv comic to television sketch artist. He follows talk about comedy from Aristophanes by saying he grew up “a chariot” ride from Greektown in Detroit.Along the way, he pauses to offer the kind of practical tips you might find in MasterClass videos. “If you are an actor in a comedy, you should be trying to make the crew laugh,” he instructs in the ninth episode. Key explains concepts taught in comedy schools like “heightening” or “the game of a scene,” and also breaks down the four main comedy-character archetypes, dating to the commedia dell’arte. Demystifying the art, he provides if not a formula, then a road map.Yet the most ambitious role he plays is not as a comedy mentor or amateur historian, but as a performer. The heart of this series, an odd genre hybrid that reminds me of Al Pacino’s documentary “Looking for Richard,” is in the sketches. Instead of relying on tape from “Saturday Night Live,” “In Living Color” or any other beloved shows, Key performs them all himself, setting them up, playing all the parts.It’s a feat to pivot from analysis to performance, let alone between Abbott and Costello and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. It’s also a risk. Can jokes from “Chappelle’s Show” still work if you take out Dave Chappelle? And considering the reputation that comedy doesn’t age well, will old sketches still make audiences laugh?They certainly crack up Keegan-Michael Key, who pairs a fan’s gushing enthusiasm with the skilled craftsmanship of a seasoned pro who knows that laughter can be contagious. Obviously, there’s no way a podcast is going to prove that Sid Caesar’s physical comedy is unmatched, as Key argues, but it can make a strong case for Bob and Ray’s “Slow Talkers of America” routine. Key’s version of this classic, built on the frustration of a conversation with a man who takes extremely long pauses, is absolutely hilarious.Key is generally a faithful interpreter, but his goofy, ingratiating sensibility inevitably offers a new take, warming up, for instance, the chilly absurdism of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” In his final episode, Key is particularly persuasive championing what he considers the pinnacle of the art form: The audition segment in “Mr. Show,” the great, innovative sketch series by David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, that hinges on an elegantly simple premise about the misunderstanding of when a scene begins. What makes Key such a superb interpreter is how alert he is to the subtle choices, the minor variations, that build pace and spin a setup into something dizzyingly funny.Key delights in witty, formally inventive comedy, which shows up in his very fine discussion of British humor in the sixth episode. Along with the obvious examples — Python, “Beyond the Fringe” — he lavishes attention on an early 1970s TV show less well known in America called “The Two Ronnies,” which builds a whole sketch on misunderstanding names. He then explains how a famous sketch he did on “Key and Peele” about a substitute teacher shares the same tactic. It isn’t the only time he uses his own experience to illuminate older work.Eddie Murphy, right, doing a Stevie Wonder impression alongside the music star on “Saturday Night Live.”Credit…Anthony Barboza/Getty ImagesThere’s a poignancy to him remembering the first time he heard his stoic father laugh. Seeing him break up at Eddie Murphy doing a Stevie Wonder impression with Wonder at his side on “Saturday Night Live” made such an impression that Key described it as “the beginning of my sketch-comedy path.” His enthusiasm can veer into cloying dad humor, but his delight in forgotten artists is infectious.It’s questionable whether Timmie Rogers belongs in this podcast (he’s more of a stand-up), but it’s still exhilarating to hear Key doing the mid-20th-century act of this trailblazer, the first comic to headline the Apollo and star in an all-Black variety show on network television, “Uptown Jubilee.” Rejecting vaudeville stereotypes and racist conventions like blackface, Rogers transitioned from a musical double act into a politically wry solo performer, making him a founding father of stand-up. Compared with fellow comic revolutionaries like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, Rogers tends to get short shrift in accounts of that era. But in performing his old catch phrase (“Oh, yeah!”), Key doesn’t just pay tribute. He offers a reintroduction.“The History of Sketch Comedy” keeps an eye on comprehensiveness, including quick histories of burlesque and vaudeville as well as the Broadway revue (“a vaudeville show dressed in a tuxedo”). The podcast goes out of its way to name-check a dizzying number of television shows. So it feels churlish to single out an omission, but the absence of Tim and Eric stands out because their aesthetic is so influential, including on shows “History” examines, like “Portlandia.”And yet, one comes away from this series not just entertained and informed, but also convinced. It has an argument, even if it doesn’t overtly state it. Sketch is a rich, deceptively intricate art, even if part of its power is in its simplicity. Fart jokes endure for a reason. In creating a de facto canon, Key proves that the best examples of sketch comedy can be triumphantly revived like classic works of theater. To put it succinctly, a necessity for the form: If Rodgers and Hammerstein, why not Nichols and May?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Keegan-Michael Key Reaches into the Past With ‘Midnight Run’ and ‘Electric Ladyland’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMy TenKeegan-Michael Key Reaches into the Past With ‘Midnight Run’ and ‘Electric Ladyland’The actor, who appears in the upcoming musical “The Prom,” looks back on improv guides, Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy and Diego Rivera’s murals.Credit…Rich Polk/Getty Images For ImdbDec. 15, 2020, 10:00 a.m. ETThe world may have turned upside-down this year, but the actor-producer Keegan-Michael Key has grounded himself in his work, finding a refuge from the isolation and anxiety of the pandemic.For a gregarious person like Key, who is used to collaborating with others on set in projects like Netflix’s “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey,” Ryan Murphy’s musical “The Prom,” and even “Home Movie: The Princess Bride” on Quibi (R.I.P.), conditions this year have forced him to work remotely every day.“It’s been fascinating to have just finished work before the pandemic really hit the States,” he said. “I was in a very, very communal experience, working on ‘The Prom.’ And then the stark contrast of doing Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting and doing audio work from your home.”Digging into the things that bring him joy has helped him keep his equilibrium, he says. In a recent phone interview from Vancouver, where he’s shooting a musical comedy for Apple TV+, Key walked through the 10 things he’s found himself revisiting during his extra time. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Every Frame a Painting”There’s a YouTube channel by a gentleman by the name of Tony Zhou, and it’s about film critique. The channel is called Every Frame a Painting [cocreated by Taylor Ramos]. I just absolutely love it, and I think it’s a tragedy that he stopped making them. Of the videos on the channel, my two favorite videos would be How to Do Visual Comedy, which is pretty much an exploration of Edgar Wright and his work. And then there’s one called How to Do Action Comedy, which is an entire episode about the art and craft of Jackie Chan.I think part of what draws me to all that stuff, to both of those, is the theatricality of them. So, the stuff with Jackie Chan I find so fascinating because he talks about how he locks off shots. He doesn’t pan or track. He always lets the performer do the special effects in the camera. So, seeing people actually jump and leap and fall and be struck is so dynamic and exciting to experience. With Edgar Wright, it’s the opposite. He uses a lot of artistry to show the passage of time, and a person moving from one place to another using cinematic techniques.But every single episode is an absolute gem. Sometimes if I’m just sitting during the day and I’m being contemplative or I have a break, I’ll find myself gravitating toward Every Frame a Painting. And it’s just something that gives me a lot of joy, and a lot of edification.2. “Impro” and “Impro for Storytellers” by Keith JohnstoneI had a director at the Second City who taught a technique about improvisation that he shared with us in a very figurative manner.He told us this quote, and I’m paraphrasing, about an improviser’s job is always to walk back, as if you’re walking backward. A performer’s always walking backward through space. As you keep walking backward, more things come into your field of vision.Oh, that’s a window, and that’s a lamp that’s now in the window. And I back up, now I see the kitchen counter. You need to see all of those things to help establish where you are.He got that idea from Keith Johnstone. He wrote a couple of really amazing books called “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre” and “Impro for Storytellers.” And they were just perpetual manuals for me when I was performing as an improviser full-time and also teaching. And I just find so many fantastic things about narrative and how he looks at game play and how to open children’s minds and have them experience life in a fearless manner.3. “Midnight Run”One of my favorite movies of all time is “Midnight Run,” with Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, Dennis Farina. Martin Brest directed it. American action films at that time had quite a lot of humor in them. But the bullets were still real. And there was this sensibility that the danger was gritty and authentic, yet there was also a place for jokes. And that’s fascinating to me.If you watch “Midnight Run,” it’s the funniest I think De Niro ever was in his career. Everything in the piece fits together. The narrative of the piece, and also how he’s reacting to Grodin. There was something very authentic about their buddy story, about the evolution of them coming together as two people.4. Kehinde WileyI think Kehinde Wiley is amazing. Just talk about an artist who really effectively uses juxtaposition. And the way that he celebrates the Black experience through another older experience. Legitimizing our very existence by saying, “Why couldn’t we have been any different to men on horseback with all this frippery, and regaling themselves with sashes and capes and sabers?” His art, it’s so dynamic and colorful and powerful and inspiring. I can’t go to an art museum right now, but I really enjoy his books so much.5. The Detroit Industry MuralsI’m from Detroit, and there’s a real love of epic that I have. In the Detroit Institute of Arts, there’s a room, and all the walls are filled with these murals that were painted by Diego Rivera in the ’30s. And they’re absolutely magnificent. It’s just these great images of all the people of the world. And then below it, almost the evolution of industry, and it’s fantastic. It’s just breathtaking. Absolutely breathtaking.6. “The Great Eastern” by Howard RodmanI read a book right on the edge of Covid. It’s a piece of historical fiction called “The Great Eastern,” and it’s fantastic.There was a civil engineer in the 19th century in England by the name Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And he helped build the tunnel underneath the Thames, and he did all this in the 1850s, 1860s. A ship called the Great Eastern suffered from an explosion. That’s all historical fact. But Howard Rodman, the author, what he did is you find out it was actually a terrorist attack. A gentleman blew up the ship, and then kidnapped Brunel. And you find out, through the story, that the person who kidnapped him is Captain Nemo.It’s great. It’s been my favorite read of the year so far.7. “Electric Ladyland” by the Jimi Hendrix ExperienceI’m an enormous Jimi Hendrix fan. I think that “Electric Ladyland,” which was his third album, is an absolute masterpiece. And something that if I ever really want to get lost in a song, my favorite song on that album is a song called “1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” And it’s like a whole big opus. And I love this song. It’s one of these great songs that has movements in it. I don’t even know how he makes the sound, but these wonderful sounds of, like, sea bells. Like, foghorn-y sounds and sea gulls. He paints a seascape with sound, and makes bubbly sounds with the bass guitar and the guitar. And the whole song is about being someone who’s submerging underneath water, because that’s going to be a place to exist in the future.8. East Asian CinemaI’m a big fan of kung fu and wuxia cinema. There was a movie that came out in 2002 called “Hero,” which is a Zhang Yimou film, with Jet Li, Tony Leung, and Zhang Ziyi. But it’s just one of the most visually sumptuous things I’ve ever seen in my life. Every character is represented by a color. And it reminds me a lot of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran.” Which again, it’s something that plays with different factions and different characters being explained by color, or influencing you, the viewer, by the color. It’s another one of these films that I could watch whenever. It’s almost like my eyes are having Thanksgiving dinner almost every 10 minutes. I’ve always had a kind of steady diet of those movies in my life.9. “Whoopi Goldberg on Broadway”I think one of the most influential things for me as an artist, but also for me seeing the world in a new way that’s always stuck for me, is when I used to listen to Whoopi Goldberg. I didn’t get to see her on Broadway, but my parents had the album, and I would listen to her play these different characters. And it was astounding. Here’s this African-American woman who’s playing several characters. She’s playing a woman with disabilities, she plays a young girl who’s Black but she had blonde hair. She’s playing a surfer girl who, as I’m listening to it, I’m hearing her voice, I’m going, “OK, yes, this girl is supposed to be white.”And then she plays this educated junkie. A junkie who travels to Amsterdam and goes to the Anne Frank [House], and talking about, “When I got my degree at Columbia,” and the audience always laughs, and she goes, “What? You think I was a junkie for my whole life?” And it’s one little line in the thing, but you go, “Oh my gosh, that’s so brilliant.” The character becomes this fully realized human in this tiny thing. It’s her using something Jordan Peele called comedic judo. She’s using your expectations against you. And it’s done so deftly.10. “Laughter” by Henri BergsonHe posits these theories about why we laugh. And one of them is about flexibility and malleability in society. So that when we move through society, we all try to be, for the most part, as fluid as we can with each other. Oftentimes, inflexibility or rigidity is what brings about laughter. There are these unwritten contracts that we have with each other, that I’m going to keep this much distance from you, or I walk out of the way as you’re coming down the street. You know, that kind of situation. We have these moments, small, infinitesimal, almost imperceptible negotiations with each other all the time. And when someone refuses to negotiate, sometimes the result is laughter.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More