Jmunney's Blog

“East/West Bowl”

“East/West Bowl” has been continuously growing in popularity since its initial airing back in October, as it has been linked to and discussed (often as it were a real thing) on football fan forums.  This sketch takes one of the simplest, but also one of the most reliable, comedy premises around – a list of silly names – and makes it so much more brilliant than one would think such a thing could ever possibly be.  Clearly it is more than just a silly list.  It has caught on because there are a lot of actual football players whose names are hardly any less ridiculous than the ones in the sketch.  It was just a matter of time before they would be called out on their ridiculousness.  Unlike most silly list-based sketches, “East/West Bowl” is filled with details.  It is quite intricate despite how simple it appears to be on first viewing.  Not only are the names silly, but so are the hairstyles, the voices, and the background photos.  Each member of the silly list gets his own unique characterization.  You don’t get all that out of most silly lists.

Runner-Up: “LMFAO’s Non-Stop Party”

The lyrics of this parody LMFAO dance-pop ditty are hilarious (and rhythmic) enough on their own without the sketch needing anything more.  At one point, the song just becomes a list of random crap (iPad, Facebook, party time, skintight jeans…) and the roll call of cities where the party is taking place eventually grow to include more unusual options such as Newark, Plano, Lincoln, and Lubbock until ultimately it could be any destination as they simply repeat “city, city, city, city.”  That would all be good enough, but this sketch is also about the existential crisis that LMFAO face when they realize the party they are at is a Groundhog Day-style endless loop.  This is why we have Key and Peele – they give us scenes inspired by Sartre featuring today’s biggest pop stars.

Season Analysis: Key & Peele betrayed a little bit of exhaustion in its second batch of episodes – it’s hard to continually pull off the unexpected in comedy.  But it was never really bad, and the best of Season 2 reached even greater heights than that of Season 1.

“Episode Two”
Most episodes of Key & Peele do not have an overarching theme (at least not one that is much different than the overall theme of the series), so one excellent sketch can make the difference in an episode being the best of the season. This was the case with Episode 2 of Season 2, which featured the already iconic “East/West Bowl” sketch.  I’ll get to my explanation of that bit’s greatness in my Best Sketch of the Season post, but for now I’ll mention Keegan and Jordan’s stand-up segment that immediately followed.  Keegan’s physical reaction to D’Brickashaw Ferguson’s mother’s explanation that “D’Brickashaw” is a family name was a thing of beauty.  Although the sketch seemed surreal, the actual people they mentioned with names like “L–a” underscored just how much it was in actuality too real.