A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.

Keegan-Michael Key

Categorized in : People Writing Stories

There's a sketch where we're playing two terrorists in a cave, and my terrorist is very frustrated as to why we haven't flown a plane into a building in 13 years.

Keegan-Michael Key

frustrated two years

Ricky Gervais changed our lives. And Mitch Hedberg, who we're like, "Oh, that's funny to me on a level I don't think I understand. But I'm clearly pleased by it beyond something that my brain's figured out." He was amazing.

Keegan-Michael Key

levels brain thinking

My adoptive mother tirelessly worked most of her life to build up my self-esteem. So what happened was finding her started to shed light and destroy my mythos. So for the first year of knowing her, my mom kind of actually literally visited me in Detroit and kind of gave me a tour of my life - where I was conceived, where I was born, where she found out she was pregnant. It was amazing, Terry, and very emotional.

Keegan-Michael Key

mom self-esteem mother

I grew up watching British television because I lived so close to Canada.

Keegan-Michael Key

canada grew-up television

You hold precious what you create for yourself in your life that makes you comfortable.

Keegan-Michael Key

comfortable

I'm racist against non-black people.

Keegan-Michael Key

racist black people

You can not have comedy unless people are behaving badly. You can't have it.

Keegan-Michael Key

behaving-badly comedy people

If you take something like the slave-auction sketch, the warmth of the light gives it a crisp 12 Years a Slave look. And your eye tells your brain, "I should be taking this seriously."

Keegan-Michael Key

light eye years

When you're a child, the most important thing is to be able to live a life of comfort. You want to be sure that the moon goes up at night and the sun comes up in the morning and dad comes home from work.

Keegan-Michael Key

dad morning children

The audience loves to figure things out. They love it when a performer leaves a trail of bread crumbs for them, and they get to participate in the comedy.

Keegan-Michael Key

crumbs comedy bread

Being a melting pot is what I think is great about being American, and also that we get to do something that other people don't get to do, we get to be a hyphenate. That's a good thing.

Keegan-Michael Key

melting people thinking

If I could just get over my issues of wanting people to like me.

Keegan-Michael Key

people

To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture.

Keegan-Michael Key

mainstream-culture white thinking

I'm adopted, so I didn't know my father, but apparently he was pretty tall.

Keegan-Michael Key

adopted knows father

For me, as a child, I certainly thought that there were more black people in the world than white people.

Keegan-Michael Key

white children people

When you say to somebody, "I'd like to recommend a book to you," you're typically talking to a person who is willing to learn, grow, or change.

Keegan-Michael Key

book

Everybody puts on airs, regardless of race.

Keegan-Michael Key

race air

It was very important thousands of years ago to categorize things. I can eat that plant, I can't eat that plant. Or this tribe, not that tribe. We don't have to do that anymore - we have processed food now!

Keegan-Michael Key

tribes important years

The fact of the matter is, you can't do comedy unless someone is behaving badly. Otherwise, it's not a comedy.

Keegan-Michael Key

comedy

If you look at any successful skit comedy show, ever, there is that format of introducing you to the player in the beginning, and then going on to see those sketches.

Keegan-Michael Key

player successful looks