Keegan-Michael Key Quotes

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

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.

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

Do what you love in your community.

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.

I think the reason I went into theater, ultimately, was because that was one of multicultural groups. Because you identify with other people that share similar passions to you, so it didn't matter how much melanin was in their skin.

There is no top. You are never going to reach the top if you go for success. That way lies madness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm racist against non-black 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.

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

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.

There is nothing more dangerous on planet Earth than a black wife.

Everybody puts on airs, regardless of race.

You could figure out at least 80 percent of the context and meaning of a text if people used punctuation, and we wouldn't have had to write our sketch.

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

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.

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

I have this little thing that people call Keegan-ese, where I don't speak English words at all. I just say stuff like, "You gotta toish the doish and you gotta maloish the hoish."

We[with Jordan Peele] wanted to do something with [Barack] Obama because we actually felt that Obama was kind of responsible for us even getting a show in the first place because there's this biracial person who might, you know, have to ride the divide between two different races.

I have always, or for the most part, identified myself as a biracial person. Much to the chagrin of a lot of African-American people that I meet, because it's almost like there's a betrayal, an intrinsic betrayal: "Don't do that, brotha, we need you. We need you here, in this fold."

One time I said to Jordan [Peele], in a text, "I will pick you up at 2:30. So if you're just standing out in front of the building, we'll go from there to the next meeting. Cool?" And my man just writes, "Wordness to the turdness."