Tonight’s episode of Key & Peele was pretty geeky overall—there was a long sequence about Game of Thrones. But the penultimate Key & Peele also included a fricken brilliant running gag about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.


Check out the first of the three segments above—there were two others, in which Tyson also uses his wacky Carl Sagan-esque explanations of the vast scale of the cosmos and time, and the uncertainty principle, and the many universes, and so on, to get out of arguments with his wife. Plus the dog is named Sputnik. What’s great is how well they nailed the wide-eyed tone of the series—“well, actually”–and plunked it down into a random domestic context. And everything is just trivial, man, once you realize that we’re living in the last second of the calendar year of the universe.

Update: Someone put the whole thing on YouTube:

Here, we made some GIFs:


It’s cosmically wondrous.

But the Game of Thrones bit, where their hotel doorman characters pretty much ran through all the major deaths in the series, was also pretty great—there have been a LOT of catalogs of Game of Thrones deaths, but this one gains points for calling Khal Drogo the big Dave Navarro. And also for the way it ends, which I won’t give away here. This episode also had a decent skit about a tailor trying to make a wedding suit for a guy whose guts keep coming out with apocalyptic rumbles.


All in all, it’s hard to believe we’re so close to the end of this show. It feels horribly unfair, like some kind of cosmic injustice.

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