Keegan-Michael Key’s all-time favorite Key & Peele sketch just happens to be Halloween-adjacent. “It’s such a silly sketch,” Key recently told PEOPLE. “It’s called ‘MJ Halloween.’”
The premise is simple: Key plays Noah, a superfan who dresses up as Michael Jackson for Jordan Peele’s Halloween party. Peele is impressed at first with Noah’s high-pitched impression, but the vocal hiccups and hip-thrusting moves refuse to stop. “I’m dressed as Michael Jackson, like ‘Thriller’ Michael Jackson,” remembered Key. “And I just spend the next four minutes — there’s no script, I’m just trying to make Jordan laugh.”
Plot? That’s pretty much it. “I’m just trying to waste time and screw up the takes and do whatever I can to make him laugh,” Key said of his ass-slapping antics. “That’s the whole damn sketch.”
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None of it worked, however. Peele, master of the deadpan, “never breaks,” marveled Key. Instead, he tells Noah to knock it off — his imitation is played out, the costume stinks and everyone dressed like Jackson three years ago when he died. Noah lowers his sunglasses to reveal tear-filled eyes. Michael Jackson is dead? Peele feels terrible about being the bearer of bad news but finds his annoyance again when Noah sad-moonwalks away.
Key holds up “MJ Halloween” as an example of “something Jordan declared in our first season, that the writing had to be bulletproof. So if you watch the first seasons of Key & Peele, it’s interesting, you’ll see there’s not a lot of improvising.”
The structure of the sketch was so sturdy, however, that Key could play with its beats. “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.”
“MJ Halloween” was Key’s favorite example of “some sketches that were just very strange and weird. And it was fun! That was a fun part of the evolution.”