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!”