In their videos, the comedy team Key & Peele display incredible linguistic competence as they code switch or use distinctive varieties of English to create characters. The language they use often takes center stage as integral to their jokes. Their characters use African American English (AAE) to engage with black culture as well as Standard American English (SAE) to produce a commentary on mainstream culture. The video that skyrocketed their fame was “Substitute Teacher” with 143 million views, which hinges on differences between the phonological systems in SAE and AAE (though these are dramatized and sometimes inaccurate) and the confusion that causes among white students taught by “an inner-city substitute teacher” played by Keegan-Michael Key.[1] In “Dating a Biracial Guy” (1.8 million views), Key plays a biracial man whose date wants him to switch between “White Jeff” and “Black Jeff” according to how she is being treated.[2] As he tries to please her, he ends up code-switching dramatically, sometimes within the same sentence. In these sketches and many others, Key & Peele use comedy to explore what it means to inhabit a black body in America, and how language is deeply tied to both identity and preconceptions.
One video which gained wide recognition and became a recurring series on their show was “Obama’s Anger Translator.” The sketch places Obama, played by Jordan Peele, next to Luther (Keegan-Michael Key), his anger translator, who uses AAE to communicate the anger and frustration that then-President Obama is feeling.[3] President Obama himself liked it so much that he invited Key to portray Luther at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner as his anger translator to “translate” diplomatic statements into emotive speech.[4]
I analyzed three videos: “Meet Luther,” “I Sunk Your Battleship, Bitch,” and the speech given by President Obama and Keegan-Michael Key at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In each video I looked at l-vocalization, r-vocalization or r-absence, the realization of /ð/ as /d/ or /v/ (“dat” for “that”), and the realization of /θ/ as /f/ or /t/ (“tin” for “thin”).
These videos include three individuals with three distinct performances of language and blackness. Jordan Peele plays President Obama, directly impersonating his mannerisms and the language he uses in the context of his public presidential duties (two videos feature Peele directly addressing the American people from the White House in a formal address).[5] Keegan Michael-Key plays Luther, the President’s anger translator, and performs a very emotive black man.[6] President Obama speaks as himself but is nonetheless performing as his own public persona when he addresses the Correspondents Dinner, with an additional layer of mimicking a sketch where he has seen himself portrayed by Peele.[7] Jordan Peele’s Obama shows almost none of the phonological features of AAE examined here.[8] In both of these videos, Peele portrays President Obama’s English as conforming to SAE phonological features.[9] The only deviation is one instance of the realization of /ð/ as /d/ or /v/ (1.3%).[10] In reality, President Obama demonstrates more features of AAE in his speech. The most dramatic difference between Peele and Obama is seen in the realization of /θ/ as /f/ or /t/.[11] This data, however, may be less significant that it appears as there were relatively few potential sites for this realization in Obama’s speech. He also displays the l-vocalization of AAE.[12] Peele does not show l-vocalization at any point in the videos analyzed, while President Obama realizes /l/ as vocalized at a rate of 21.7%.[13] It is important to note that a majority of these occurrences take place at a point in the speech where Obama begins to get more emotional, shifting from performing even-temperedness to performing anger, shouting about the inaction of Republicans on climate change. [14]
From this, we can see that Key’s performance as Luther uses AAE, while President Obama and Peele are speak in idiolects much closer to SAE. In doing this, Key & Peele show tacit recognition for the state of AAE in the American mainstream. They understand that President Obama would not have become President if he were to have campaigned speaking in stronger AAE, and that speaking in AAE is still off-limits to him in many spaces and formal capacities. The data also offers some deeper insight into how the performance of blackness is restricted in that public space. The l-vocalization of President Obama and the switch in r-vocalization by Key between videos hint at the possibility of distinct features being conditioned independently of each other. Because they are performing rehearsed speeches or skits, Obama and Key are likely both highly attentive to the words they are using and the way they are using them, if not to each individual sound, then at least the register in which they are speaking. Therefore, we might ask if they are reacting to perceptibly different social values attached to l-vocalization and r-vocalization, whether consciously or unconsciously. Key shows the highest rate of each AAE feature overall, as well as in each video independently.[15] The highest rate of realization is in the category of r-vocalization/absence.[16] In the other three categories, he displays similar rates of realization across all three video, whereas Key’s realization of r-vocalization drops to 31% in “I Sunk Your Battleship, Bitch” compared to 63% at the Correspondents’ Dinner and 72.4% in “Meet Luther.”[17] One difference between the performances in “I Sunk Your Battleship, Bitch,” and the other videos is that Key is portraying not anger, but joy, excited about a debate victory over Mitt Romney, which might indicate an association between anger and r-vocalization rather than a more general association between emotional speech and AAE features. R-vocalization, the realization of /ð/ as /d/ or /v/, and the realization of /θ/ as /f/ or /t/ are realized at lower rates in the “Battleship” video as well, though the shift is much less dramatic.[18]
The extra-linguistic features employed by all three men certainly exist above the level of consciousness. Rickford, in a 1972 study, found that respondents cited pitch and intonation most frequently cited as markers when they were able to correctly identify a black speaker versus a white speaker.[19] Even as multiple phonological features mark AAE as distinct from SAE, it is pitch and intonation which are often articulable as the difference between “white speech” and “black speech.” The “Obama’s Anger Translator” sketch reflects this awareness, as Peele uses a hyperbolically flat tone through his portrayal of Obama, even when he breaks the politician character to blatantly insult Mitt Romney at the end of the “I Sunk Your Battleship, Bitch” video.[20] It is in this moment where Peele breaks character phonologically and realizes “never” as “nevah.”[21] Conversely, Key uses highly exaggerated pitch in his character as Luther, seemingly speaking as low as his voice allows and then rising up into a falsetto to express his emotions.[22] President Obama, again, falls between these two extremes. He is not as even as Peele, sounding much more conversational and natural whereas Peele comes off as purposefully affected.[23] When he begins to get angry at the end of the bit, his pitch follows much wider contours than the rest of his speech, indicating a shift towards AAE.[24] However, he also never reaches the falsetto or deeply swooping extremes of Key as Luther.[25]
The body language in these characters is also important to their performance. Peele typically keeps his hands folded, holding each other one over the other, or constrained to the arms of his chair. He uses a cupped palm moved in a small, circular motion to emphasize points, sometimes partially extending his pointer finger while keeping the rest of his fingers slightly back to meet the thumb. He remains seated throughout the course of both videos, nodding as he speaks. Otherwise, he remains still throughout the videos, his torso or lower body never engaged as a part of his communication. The palpable restraint he shows goes further towards communicating the unnatural nature of the veneer that President Obama often adopts in order to be accepted by mainstream society in a position of political power.
In this respect, as in others, Key serves as the foil to Peele. His body underscores the extreme restraint exercised by Peele by enacting the absence of that very restraint. Instead of an internalized tension, Key’s physicality appears more like a coil primed to release. His hands rest in front of his sternum, held slightly away from his body, his hyperextended, ring-laden fingers interlaced. His arms are held away from the body as well, elbows out. He stands, instead of sitting, and is never completely still. When he moves, he takes full advantage of all of the space available to him. He steps towards the camera, jumps, walks back and forth, and in both videos with Peele runs off screen as he gets more and more worked up. President Obama, giving his speech, stands behind his podium and moves very minimally, as Key moves around him.[26] He largely keeps his hands on the podium, occasionally raising one hand to make a point. When he grows angry about climate change, he begins to more fully engage his body, incorporating his shoulder and upper body as he jabs his finger in the air.
Through the phonological and extralinguistic features, as well as the body language used by Key, Peele, and Obama to create their characters, the three men demonstrate an association between traditional institutions of political power and SAE, and between emotionality and AAE. But the sketch does not exist in a vacuum, and through historical and cultural context, Key & Peele’s video further help to produce a commentary on this association and create points of contact between the presidency and blackness. Key & Peele, in taking on the voice of a black president, take their places in a comedic genealogy that examines political power and blackness, including Richard Pryor’s “First Black President” and Dave Chappelle’s “Black Bush.”[27] As Lisa Guerrero points out, however, they are the first to do so in a moment when a black president is more than just an imaginary.[28]
“First Black President,” which premiered on The Richard Pryor Show in 1977, is, on its face, much more racially charged than “Obama’s Anger Translator.” It invokes the Black Panthers, the FBI’s extended, decried investigations into Huey Newton, and commentary on tropes of black men sleeping with white women.[29] Pryor’s bit, however, relies just as heavily upon language as Key & Peele’s. Pryor’s president, as the sketch goes on, uses more and more phonological, grammatical, and lexical markers of AAE. His body language goes from stiff and upright to looser, as he moves with his words. The skit ends with a white reporter inciting violence by violating a rule of communication and insulting Pryor’s character’s mother, a blatant violation of cultural codes in the black community.
“Black Bush” by Dave Chappelle (2004), like Key & Peele, makes direct commentary on the actions of a sitting president, George W. Bush.[30] The first sentence in the sketch is delivered using a formal register of Standard English which them immediately shifts to AAE when Chappelle asks “if he can be real about it” and continues to employ AAE through the rest of the clip. The dramatization highlights the hypocrisy in George W. Bush’s actions and serves as an indictment of the President. It critiques his behaviors by stripping them of the standard, political linguistic dances that shroud presidential action and translating them into AAE and ‘keepin it real.’
The sociocultural context that made Pryor and Chappelle’s sketches relevant is important to Key & Peele’s, as well. African American English has historically been used as a proxy for race by racist commentators as well. AAE became a major target of satire and demeaning ‘humour’ when the Oakland Ebonics resolution, which would have introduced AAE into the classroom of some public schools, placed AAE at the center of a national conversation which used language as a proxy for race. The Ebonics Translator was one iteration of the racist backlash to the resolution, and provided a service where users could send text written in SAE and receive a copy of that text translated into an (often) hyperbolic and inaccurate version of AAE within 24 hours.[31] These translations were not only an example of how AAE was a cultural, as well as a linguistic, product, including references to gangs and other things considered to be “black.” Language has constantly proved to be a very effective proxy for race in this country, as judgments about someone’s language are, in reality, judgments about them.
By creating and emphasizing the differences between Peele’s Obama and Key’s Luther, Key & Peele tap not only into a history of black comedy surrounding the presidency and grapple with the idea of translation between SAE and AAE, but into several larger concepts and stereotypes. The sketch can be interpreted as a manifestation of the DuBoisian concept of double consciousness, which recognizes a dual and dueling psyche that exists within black America, a “twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”[32] Geneva Smitherman connects this duality to the linguistic development of black Americans, where
In an effort to establish and mainstream themselves as first class citizens, African Americans, on the one hand, subscribe to the linguistic ethnocentrism of the dominant society…On the other hand, their history of struggle has depended for its success on cultural and linguistic solidarity situated within a Black Experiential…This linguistic ‘push-pull’ is a reflection of DuBoisian “double-consciousness.”[33]
By bringing Luther in to act as a translator for Obama (both in the sketches and at the Correspondents’ dinner), Key & Peele relieve the tension of two identities forced to share one body, and give each identity its own embodiment. They allow two black men to exist in the same conceptual communicative space and force contact and direct interaction between the two linguistic identities produced by double consciousness.
The video series also invokes the cultural stereotype of the Angry Black Man. The idea that black men are threatening is deeply ingrained into the cultural hegemony, which serves to maintain historical and current power dynamics between white and black bodies in America. It is impossible to escape the violent consequences of this stereotype which reverberate today in police brutality and hate crimes. But the stereotype is present in all aspects of life. In one study of gendered racism in the workplace, respondents described the cultural image of the Angry Black Man as “a middle-class, educated African American male who, despite his economic and occupational successes, perceives racial discrimination everywhere and consequently is always enraged.”[34] The overwhelming response to this idea is an attempt on behalf of the black men to avoid conforming to this stereotype, rather than to challenge it directly.[35] But Key & Peele’s “Obama Anger Translator” appears to step out of this avoidance. In doing so, the actors reject the idea that it is the responsibility of black people to assuage white fear borne of prejudice and recognize human complexity that black people are so often disallowed, which gives space for a multiplicity of emotion or intention. However, as Lisa Guerrero points out in “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness,” they also tend to pull back from directly racial language.[36] In the video “I Sunk Your Battleship, Bitch,” Peele asks Luther to “rope it in” when he refers to birthers as “crackas,” and despite the relevance of racial tensions throughout his presidency, the sketch focuses the pinnacle of its anger instead on climate change and these birthers. While it is certainly possible that the only reason Key and Peele avoid blatant discussion of race, it is also a move which shifts responsibility for addressing and “fixing” from black shoulders to white ones, and recognizes that black Americans do not exist in a vacuum—that problems which affect all Americans include black Americans.
“I Sunk Your Battleship, Bitch” is an even stronger rejection of the Angry Black Man, as it presents black joy through the same conduit as “Meet Luther” and the Correspondents’ Dinner, both of which communicate messages of black anger or frustration.[37] In “I Sunk Your Battleship, Bitch,” the manifestation of double consciousness enables Peele to access the language and physicality of joy as represented through the black body, which is restricted to him because of his public platform and the social restraints upon AAE.[38] This video, and the need for it at all, recognizes that it is not just black anger, but blackness whether that be used to communicate anger or joy, which is unpalatable to the American public and which would preclude President Obama from being well-received because of prejudice and the effectiveness of language as proxy for race.
There is another important inversion that occurs between the “Meet Luther” video and the performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In “Meet Luther,” We see Peele rein Key in when his anger gets too real.[39] At the Correspondents’ Dinner, we see the roles reverse, as Key steps back from President Obama and tells him he needs counseling when he begins to perform anger instead of keeping himself under control.[40] Guerrero identifies the fulcrum of this moment when she says, “performative black anger is funny and acceptable, but real black anger is crazy and threatening.”[41] While the admission of a split in black American’s identities is being accepted in these sketches, there are limits on the public collapsing of the double consciousness back into one body through language isn’t yet acceptable.
Perhaps most importantly, “Obama’s Anger Translator” makes more explicit a connection implicit in Pryor, Chappelle, DuBois, and Smitherman’s works; that communicative value exists in African American English; that it is not an “incorrect” or “broken” English, but that it brings new meanings to the content of a statement. In the first video, Peele explicitly states that Luther is there to clear up any confusion about how he is feeling. Key’s AAE is not a joke that obscures Obama’s true meaning. Instead, it is the Standard American English that hides Peele’s feelings as AAE serves to much more authentically communicate Peele’s emotions to the audience. It shows that language matters and flips ridicules of AAE as bad English (ineffective for communication) into that very same critique of SAE, a critique that President Obama seconds by performing with Luther in a public and professional setting. Recognizing the legitimacy and the importance of AAE, Key & Peele once again make language the star of their work.
***
[1] Comedy Central. “Substitute Teacher – Key & Peele.” Youtube video, 3:01. October 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw.
[2] Comedy Central. “Key & Peele – Dating a Biracial Guy.” Youtube video, 2:17. February 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZvVYQL3Hp8.
[3] Key & Peele – Obama’s Anger Translator – Meet Luther – Uncensored.” Youtube video, 2:47. January 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qv7k2_lc0M.
[4] The Daily Conversation. “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.” Youtube video, 5:09. April 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6NfRMv-4OY.
[5] Comedy Central. “Key & Peele – Obama’s Anger Translator – Victory.” Youtube video, 1:38. November 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX8tL3PMj7o; “Meet Luther.”
[6] Ibid.
[7] “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”
[8] “Meet Luther.”; “Victory.”
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] “Meet Luther.”; “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”; “Victory.”
[12] “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”
[13] “Meet Luther.”; “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”; “Victory.”
[14] “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”
[15] “Meet Luther.”; “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”; “Victory.”
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] John R. Rickford. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. (New York: Wiley, 2000,) 102.
[20] “Victory.”
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] “Meet Luther.”; “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”; “Victory.”
[24] “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”
[25] Ibid.
[26] “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”
[27] Michael Angelo. “Richard Pryor – First Black President (1977).” Filmed 1977. Youtube video, 6:51. Post August 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvehAOCNwp8; Comedy Central. “Black Bush – Uncensored.” http://www.cc.com/video-clips/jmcxny/chappelle-s-show-black-bush—uncensored.
[28] Lisa Guerrero. “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness.” Studies in American Humor 2, no. 2 (2016): 266-79. doi:10.5325/studamerhumor.2.2.0266.
[29] “First Black President.”
[30] “Black Bush.”
[31] Baugh, John. “Racist Reactions and Ebonics Satire” from Beyond Ebonics : Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice, Oxford University Press, 2000.
[32] W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk. (New York: Dover Publications, 1903), 3.
[33] Geneva Smitherman. Talkin That Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African America. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 295.
[34] Adia Harvey Wingfield. ““The Modern Mammy and the Angry Black Man: African American Professionals ‘Experiences with Gendered Racism in the Workplace.”.” Race, Gender & Class 14, no. 1/2 (2007). 205.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Lisa Guerrero. “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness.” 266-277.
[37] “Meet Luther”; “Victory.”
[38] “Victory.”
[39] “Meet Luther.”
[40] “President Obama’s Anger Translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner.”
[41] Lisa Guerrero. “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness.