I came across the com­e­dy duo Key & Peele just pri­or to Jor­dan Peele’s direc­to­r­i­al career blow­ing up with the release of his films Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and, just last month, Nope. I have seen the first two of those movies, and they are intrigu­ing, slick psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror films, but it’s his com­e­dy with part­ner Kee­gan-Michael Key that inter­ests us here. The two first worked togeth­er on Amer­i­can sketch com­e­dy series Mad TV but broke out with their own series on Com­e­dy Cen­tral.

Key and Peele are black Amer­i­cans and their sketch­es often focus on eth­nic stereo­types and social awk­ward­ness in race rela­tions but they are very fun­ny with it, and no more so than in their two Sub­sti­tute Teacher sketch­es. In these, Key plays Mr Gar­vey, an angry and intim­i­dat­ing sub­sti­tute teacher and vet­er­an of inner-city school­ing, who has come to teach a class of white, mild-man­nered sub­ur­ban stu­dents.

Since Mr Gar­vey is pre­sum­ably used to teach­ing kids with first names hav­ing every spelling and pro­nun­ci­a­tion under the sun, he strug­gles with the reg­u­lar spellings and pro­nun­ci­a­tions of these white kids’ names: when tak­ing the class roll he pro­nounces Jacque­line as “Jay-kwellin”, Blake as “Balarkay”, Denise as “Dee-nice” and Aaron as “A‑A-Ron”. Any attempt­ed cor­rec­tion is seen as an affront and there’s no way he’s going to take it, so he forces them to acknowl­edge them­selves by his incor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tions and threat­ens to send them to Prin­ci­pal O’Shaughnessy’s office (whose name he pro­nounces “O‑Shag-hen­nessy”).

The con­cept of Sub­sti­tute Teacher is very clever and Key absolute­ly nails his char­ac­ter. With excel­lent con­tri­bu­tions from the sup­port­ing cast of stu­dents whose names are so amus­ing­ly man­gled, it’s very, very fun­ny. “You done messed up, A‑A-Ron!”