School Climate & Safety

Comedy Duo Key and Peele: Why Not Treat Teachers Like Pro Athletes?

By Ross Brenneman — July 28, 2015 1 min read
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In advance of their newest episode Wednesday, the stars of the Comedy Central sketch show “Key & Peele” have released a video asking an important question: Why don’t teachers get the same level of glory as professional athletes?

The beauty of “Key & Peele,” starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, comes in how every sketch crescendos from smartly funny to hilariously absurd, which is just a way of saying you should watch this all the way to the end.

They are not the first comedians to suggest the underlying idea in this video, though. Last year, for example, BuzzFeed similarly asked why the country doesn’t treat its educators like it treats its NFL athletes:

Signing for a multimillion dollar contract sounds nice, considering the average teacher’s salary, and being the first-round draft pick in a fantasy school league would probably be great, too.

I don’t love blog posts that tear apart a good joke, though, so I won’t dive into how athletes are more like commodities than people, that they live by their stat lines, that they’re subject to mass ridicule for any questionable activity, and that some are so run into the ground that they often peak before they turn 30. Feel free to draw any comparisons to the teaching profession.

This is the last season of “Key & Peele,” airing Wednesday nights on Comedy Central at 10 p.m. ET.


More proof that education can be funny sometimes:

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.