I just started watching Key & Peele about a month ago and knew right away that I’d been missing out…

Comedy Central promoted the first season with the tagline “If you don’t watch this show, you’re a racist,” but “Key and Peele” rarely resorts to the kind of binary racial humor so appreciated by Homer Simpson — black people do this, white people do that — and the color line is far from being its sole concern. (Nor is it all pathos, pathos, pathos. One sketch ponders the eternal question “What if names were farts?”) Where the comedy is racial, the familiar, singular “race card” is switched for something more like the whole pack fanned out, with the focus on what Peele has called “the absurdity of race.” “I always look back at standardized tests,” he said, as he sat in Hair and Makeup, making a small but significant wig transition from “sports announcer” to “sportscaster.” “They make you say what race you are, where you check out, and I think that’s ultimately an unhealthy tradition.” His eyes, naturally rather narrow, widened dramatically. “It is crazy that as a kid we’re taught, ‘What is your identity?’ We’re asked that!” Key, who sat at the other end of the trailer, going from having hair to being bald to having hair again, is similarly struck by the irrational nature of racial categories. “The limbic system is alive and well,” he said. “And it’s going, ‘I need to find a category. I need to find a category. If I don’t find a category, I’m not safe.’ ”

I just started watching Key & Peele about a month ago and knew right away that I’d been missing out — Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are sagacious, laidback, and just really, really goddamned funny. Zadie Smith profiles them for the New Yorker and it’s thoughtful, intimate, and written by Zadie Smith, so what more could you want?