Jordan Peele

John Bankston

Description

Submitted for your approval: one comedian-turned-horror-film-director Jordan Peele. Peele performed on the comedy television shows MADtv and SNL before teaming up with fellow comedian Keegan-Michael Key to make their own sketch comedy program, Key & Peele. Yet, when Peele tried his hand at writing and directing, he switched genres from comedy to horror with the films Get Out and Us. Regardless of genre, Peele's works often aim to touch upon real-life social issues in an entertaining way. Jordan Peele examines the life, career, and inspirations of this talented comedian, screenwriter, and director.

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Actuación
• América
• Film director
• Comedian
• Performing arts
• African American
• American
• Director
• Art performance
• Actor

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438195469
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Jordan Peele
Copyright © 2019 by Infobase
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Contents Chapters One Shot Only but not Lonely Performance A New Path Getting Mad! Dynamic Duo Getting Out of Comedy Next Steps Support Materials Timeline Filmography and Awards Bibliography Further Resources About the Author Learn More About Second City Theatre, Chicago The Dakota The Blum Effect
Chapters
One Shot
Jordan Peele was going to play Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live . It seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime.
“Seth Myers is a good buddy of mine,” Peele told Terry Gross in 2013, “So he called me and he asked me if I had an Obama impression. I didn’t at the time. But, you know, SNL [ Saturday Night Live ]had always been a dream of mine... I worked on the impression for a week and… flew out and I was actually offered a job on the show.”
For over 40 years, comedians on SNL have imitated presidents. During the sketch comedy show’s first season, Chevy Chase pretended to be then-President Gerald Ford. Phil Hartman’s portrayals of presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton helped make him famous. Dana Carvey’s imitation of President George H.W. Bush earned him an invitation to the White House and a chance to perform before the man he impersonated. And Will Ferrell’s impersonation of Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, helped elevate him from ensemble performer to movie star .
In 2007, the show needed a comedian to imitate a presidential candidate. That year, one-term senator Barack Obama had announced he’d be running. Peele immediately felt a kinship. Like Obama, Peele was biracial. He too was the child of a black father and a white mother. The fathers of both men left when they were young. While Obama was raised by his white grandmother in middle-class comfort, Peele’s childhood was spent sharing a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his mom. 
“Fifteen, twenty years ago, I decided I wanted to be a sketch performer,” he explained in  a 2015 interview with The New Yorker . Joining Saturday Night Live’ s cast was always “the dream. That was what I set out to do.” Unfortunately, by the time he auditioned, Peele was already performing on a competing show. Airing on the Fox Network, MADtv was a similar sketch comedy program with a smaller audience and less critical respect. Peele had joined the show in 2003.
In 2007, the Writer’s Guild of America went on strike. The union represented most of the men and women who wrote for TV, including MADtv’ s writers . Without writers, most TV shows shut down — there would be no new episodes until the strike was over. Peele was able to pursue his dream job because “... we had a few episodes left of MADtv,” as he explained to Gross, “but there was this big question whether the show was going to come back at all after the writers’ strike” because of its low ratings.
Joining SNL would be about more than Peele portraying a president. The show was often criticized for its lack of diversity. Lindsay Shookus, an SNL producer, argued in a 2013 Washington Post article that, “ SNL has a history of including many hosts, musical guests, and cast members with different backgrounds. When we scout for the show, we always look for diverse voices and representation.” 
Throughout its over forty year-run, the show had served as a launchpad for several African-American comics, including Eddie Murphy and Tim Meadows. Still, for the most part the program’s cast resembled its audience—which was young and predominantly white.
The WGA strike was settled in February of 2008. Peele went back to work. Although his run on MADtv ended that May, by then SNL had tapped a different actor to portray Obama. “That was a heartbreak that it didn’t work out, but everything happens for a reason,” he explained in an interview four years later with The Wall Street Journal .
As difficult as losing the job was, watching someone else do it was even harder.  The month Peele returned to work, SNL cast member Fred Armisen first appeared as Obama with fellow cast member Amy Poehler playing Hillary Clinton. Armisen’s parents were Japanese and Venezuelan-German. 
In a column for the London, UK Guardian newspaper, Hannah Poole noted that the season’s cast included just one black performer. “Casting a black actor wouldn’t have guaranteed the quality of the sketch but it would have made the whole thing a lot less shoddy. Let’s get one thing straight. The moment anyone starts reaching for ‘blackface’ they are on extremely dodgy territory... SNL obviously decided that if they only used a little make up on [Armisen], as opposed to full-on ‘black face,’ it would somehow be less offensive. Wrong...The fact is, if you can’t do a believable impression of Obama without face paints then you shouldn't be doing one at all.” 
In an interview with The Washington Post that year, SNL ’s creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels defended his casting, explaining that he auditioned several actors to play Obama but, “when it came down to it, I went with the person with the cleanest comedy ‘take’ on Obama.”
For Peele watching another comedian imitate the newly elected president was a “strange, strange little period” in his career but he admitted to The New Yorker, “I think the strategist in me went, ‘All right, well what does this mean? This means there’s gotta be something that I can put these skills into; there’s gotta be a reason I’m not doing this, ultimately.’”
Good Timing
Peele struggled after he left MADtv . He had small roles in the movies Little Fockers and Wanderlust. He did a voice on the cartoon SuperNews! and played Dr. Brian in Children’s Hospital . On MADtv , he’d often worked with Keegan-Michael Key. The two met doing improv at the Second City Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Key had remained on the show until it was cancelled in 2009. He’d also had a hard time landing steady work. Peele and Key shared a talent manager. Joel Zadak suggested they team up and write together for the first time. 

Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key at the 73rd Annual Peabody Awards for Key & Peele . May 2014.
Source: Peabody Awards
Peele and Key had more than just comedy in common. They were both biracial, with black fathers and white mothers. It gave them a unique opportunity—allowing them to portray a greater variety of characters and comment on a wider range of issues than most other comedians. “Being of mixed background, we liken it to walking on a tightrope at different points in our lives,” Peele told the website A.V. Club . “At certain points, it seems like we’re between two worlds, or we’re a part of two worlds, or we question where our world is. So I think that in itself had something to do with the fact that Keegan and I sought out sketch comedy. In our form we could... figuratively be chameleons. For Peele, being a performer felt natural, whether it was being a sketch comedy “chameleon” or trying to fit in as an imaginative but quiet boy growing up in New York City.
Only but not Lonely
Jordan Peele was just starting school when his father moved out. He wouldn’t see him again for over a decade. 
Hayward Peele was a jazz musician. Jordan told NPR’s Terry Gross that, “I knew him up until about six years old, and that would’ve been, you know, my going to his place of work once a month, once every couple of months, until he was sort of out of the picture without any real concrete explanation as to why he was out of the picture... I’ve since learned that, you know, he’s got many kids across the country and other countries.”
Jordan admits that he didn’t learn his father had died in 1999 until a couple of years afterward. It took even longer before he could grieve. “So much of that pain is internalized,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2019, “and you don’t really notice it until you’re watching some movie where there’s a father-and-son thing that you just start crying for no reason.. I find that a lot of my work deals with those themes.”
Despite his father’s absences, he has good memories of the brief time they spent together. His mother, Lucinda Williams, told The New York Times Magazine in 2017 that she tried to keep father and son connected. She played jazz for Jordan and made Hayward’s favorite meals. She only intervened when he asked Jordan why he “‘talked white.’ I knew I couldn't allow that,” she told the Times.
Jordan Haworth Peele was born on February 21, 1979 in New York, New York. His father was African American, his mother was white. She “..wanted to name me something possibly biblical, something water-related for some reason,” he explained to Fresh Air in 2013. “So she went with Jordan.” And while he thinks his middle name sounds “kind of like a comedian butler,” it’s preferable to the first name she was considering: “Noah, you know, another water-related biblical name. But of course my mom realized I would have been Noah Peele” which sounds like “no appeal.”

Central Park, New York City
Source: Shutterstock.
Jordan admitted to USA Today in 2012 that both he and comedy partner Keegan Michael Key faced challenges. “Growing up, we've been on all sides of racial situations, from not being able to walk in a certain store without being followed, like we’re going to be stealing something, to having our voices made fun of on the street by other African Americans.” He realizes that his everyday voice sounds like the person he heard the most when he was young—his mother. Yet he looked more like his father than his pale blonde mom. 
“And I think the most trying p