In a rare show of confidence for a promising, young program that does not feature the smirking mockery of Daniel Tosh, Comedy Central has renewed the sketch-comedy series Key & Peele for a second season, set to air this coming fall. Or to put it in terms that the axe-happy execs at Comedy Central might better understand: The cancellation of Key & Peele has been delayed until at least early 2013.
It helps that the show is delivering the types of numbers that can please its notoriously fickle network overlords: Key & Peele is Comedy Central’s strongest-performing new series since Tosh.0, and it just might be the signature sketch show the network has lacked since Dave Chappelle fled Chappelle’s Show for a life of African sabbaticals and testing the patience of his audiences. It also can’t hurt that Key & Peele resembles the hybrid sketch/stand-up model that proved so successful for Chappelle—though none of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s riffs on pop culture and racial identity have yet achieved the cultural ubiquity of, say, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” And as much as we’d hate to see the world at large quote Key & Peele into oblivion, for the continued success of the show, you should try to work at least one “I have a hot, diggity, daggity, mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah birth certificate” into conversation today.