Of mixed race, the sons of black fathers and white mothers, Key and Peele—both are alumni of the Second City Chicago’s improv theater—are the comedy tribunes of the Barack Obama era, and one of their most popular, jugular-poking routines is the White House address in which Obama (Peele) speaks to the nation with his usual reassuring, measured cadences, living up to his billing as “No-Drama Obama,” while his Anger Translator, Luther (Key), vents what’s really boiling under the lid of the president’s decorous super-ego, the raw, unexpurgated goods. Where Obama is careful not to gloat over beating Mitt Romney in the third presidential debate, Luther breaks into a victory strut: “Boom, Mitt! I sunk your battleship, bitch!” One of the themes ribboning through Key and Peele is how black anger, black pride, black sensitivity over slights, second-class treatment, and worse, get bottled inside—bricked up behind a stoic public mask—until the contents explode and all kinds of crazy-ass stuff comes out. “Standing by your guns even if they’re empty” is how Key described their characters’ defiant stance to Elvis Mitchell in an interview on KCRW radio’s The Treatment. Key, with his ballistic bald head, loco eyes, and rangy extension (his arms seem to elongate like Reed Richards’s of the Fantastic Four), is the one who usually goes on the unhinged warpath, not only with his calisthenically emphatic Luther but also with another recurring favorite, substitute teacher Mr. Garvey, whose 20 years spent teaching in inner-city schools have him going after his milquetoast white students as if they were trying to pull a fast one. It is also Key who plays the dude regaling his pals around the pool table by boasting, “I put the pussy on the chain wax,” a non-sequitur catchphrase that he’s trying to make go viral until busted by Peele, who, armed with a healthy skepticism and a quick search of Google, forces Key to admit that “pussy on the chain wax” is not a thing. (The hilarious peak of the sketch is the poignant, soap-opera close-up of Key, his voice tremulous and hurt as a sad piano plinks falling raindrops of notes on the soundtrack, imploring, “Why do you have to belittle me like that?”) With his studious glasses, compact frame, and thoughtful core of containment, Peele tends to be the stabilizer in such sketches, the ballast, though his own wild side is unbottled when he gets into wiggy drag as Meegan, the one-woman wrecking crew whose mouthiness is a constant incitement.

Even the most talented members of the Saturday Night Live cast usually end up restricted within a narrow band of transmutation. They nail one or two celebrity impersonations or novelty characters, and those become their niche, their shtick, their standbys, repeated week after week until they’re driven into the ground. Key and Peele, not so much a comedy team as a two-man troupe, occupy full bandwidth. They possess a Peter Sellers protean range. Mixmasters of personae, they zip into the skins of the gay, straight, young, old, fat, thin, rich, poor, butch, femme, Asian, Native American, Latino, Indian, white, off-white, contemporary, historical, earthling, extraterrestrial, and undead (“Sexy Vampires,” their writhing, tongue-flicking spoof of HBO’s True Blood) alike with nary a snag. Polylinguists of dialect, slang, and rhetorical rhubarb, they are fluent in UFC trash talk, crotch-grab hip-hop braggadocio, Shakespearean brocade, gritty police-drama clichés (spit out like shell casings), and the idiot banter of local news anchors. They don’t wink at the audience, riding the surf of their characters’ quirks and distancing themselves from the buffoonery; inside operators, they play their comedy mostly straight, as a clash of wills or a garbled miscommunication that takes on a mad logic of its own and spirals out of control. They try to remain true to what their characters want even if what their characters want is demented.