ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, the final chapter of this book, I examine the show Key & Peele as a bookend to the show that stands as an exemplar of sketch comedy and black satire, Chappelle’s Show. Of importance in this chapter is establishing the sociohistorical context in which Key and Peele are creating their satiric critiques, especially in the context of the Obama presidency and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Examining three of the show’s most popular sketches, “Substitute Teacher,” “Luther, Obama’s Anger Translator,” and “Negrotown,” I focus on Key and Peele’s use of a dissociative consciousness to create spaces for a black subject sovereignty to be achieved. Additionally, I am interested in this chapter in looking at how Key and Peele foreground black play and black joy as critical mechanisms for both actualizing a sovereign black subjectivity, as well as serving as a profound counter-narrative to the insistence of black precarity. Finally, the examination explores the idea of competing black dissociative realities, as well as the limits of racial madness to provide a lasting liberation for the black subject.
