See all of our Best TV of 2015 here.

Amongst the variety of television milestones that hit the TV and streaming landscape this year, from the series finales of Hannibal and Mad Men to the immediately appealing premieres of Jessica Jones, The Man in the High Castle, and Master of None, it might be easy to forget that this was also the year where Comedy Central bid farewell to Key & Peele. Driving one of the most creative and culturally attuned sketch comedy programs ever, the duo of Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key worked uniquely in the world of delivery and diction on their show, finding a plethora of hugely comical avenues and creating unique characters via a strikingly perceptive ability to play with how people sound. In each episode, they stretched, reshaped, and completely detonated language in the hopes of expressing perspectives ranging from the sober to the absurd. They proved to be not only the long-delayed inheritors to Dave Chapelle's thrown, but also the stirringly strange humor rhythms of The State, Mr. Show, and The Kids in the Hall.

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Image via Comedy Central

Of course, they've gone onto bigger and (hopefully) better things (such as their upcoming comedy Keanu) as has Amy Schumer, who broke out on several tiers in 2015 with the undervalued Trainwreck, her sharp HBO stand-up special, and, of course, Inside Amy Schumer. Along with Key & Peele, the insurmountable South Park, and the increasingly strong Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Inside Amy Schumer reasserted Comedy Central as one of the great titans of modern television programming, finding especial talents and giving the creative freedoms that tend to make the bigger networks edgy; this is also the network that gave Nick Kroll an open platform with Kroll Show.


The best comedy sketch clips of 2015 came primarily from Inside Amy Schumer and Key & Peele but their oddly insightful and endlessly inventive attitudes towards their fellow men and women, and the world at large, had brethren elsewhere, from juggernauts like Portlandia and Saturday Night Live, as well as the brief, brilliant return of Dave Cross and Bob Odenkirk in W/ Bob and Dave. Below, we've picked our very favorite moments from this years sketch comedy programs, all of which find fresh and timely reconfigurations of classic comedy set-ups, making each of them classics in their own right.

"Close Encounter" (SNL)

Though often considered a cheat or just a general no-no, the sight of someone attempting to repress laughter and keep it together is one of the quickest short-cuts to guffaws out there. In the case of the "Close Encounter" sketch from the Ryan Gosling episode of Saturday Night Live, it's a minor part of a greater comedic contraption, anchored by Kate McKinnon's outstanding performance as a survivor of an alien abduction. Easily the show's biggest talent, McKinnon here brings an attitude of commonplace, feet-on-the-ground straight shooting to what others consider a spiritual phenomenon rather than a physical experience, which McKinnon's character hilariously expresses.

"Milk Milk Lemonade" (Inside Amy Schumer)

In the opening sketch of her latest season of Inside Amy Schumer, the titular comedian tangled with the scatological underpinnings and base impulses that drives men's attraction to females' backsides. In one fail swoop, she touches on the outlandishly juvenile and the brazenly feminist, as well as criticizing rap-video stereotypes with a freshness that hasn't been felt in years. The cameos by Amber Rose, Amber Tamblyn, and Jemima Kirke are all excellent, but its the final appearance by the great Method Man that quickly announced that Schumer had found her groove with her latest season.

"PubLIZity - Liz G's New Look" (Kroll Show)

Though he never went for big jokes in Kroll Show, Nick Kroll’s talent has always been in parody, in scouring the most insufferably formulaic of reality and narrative series for stylistic tics that seem even more cheap and ridiculous when the tone of the show is slight configured. Here, he skewers the slate of simply inexcusable Bravo reality programming that focus on attention-addicted terrors of all sorts, embodying them in the publicity agent of the title. The dialogue is spot-on and giddily sardonic but even more striking is the use of the worst kind of cheap rock and pop to underline already painfully obvious moments, a regular tactic used by reality TV producers. As always, Kroll’s attention to nuance gives his cynicism a rare sort of boisterousness.

"Gremlins 2 Brainstorm" (Key & Peele)

For fans of Joe Dante’s kind-of brilliant sequel to his malevolent original, Key and Peele offered a riotous view of how such a wildly unhinged film could ever get written, produced, and released, with the latter playing a Hollywood script doctor who whips a writers’ room up into a creative frenzy. Peele’s caricature is hilariously absurd, but the core of the laughter comes from the reasoning of the sketch: that the people who make modern films will accept any sort of want or logic in the hopes of pleasing everyone rather than keeping it sober. Ironically, it’s the erratic tone of Gremlins 2: The New Batch that helps bring out the film’s rueful attitude towards the capitalistic impulse that the sketch similarly pokes fun at.

"Last F**kable Day" (Inside Amy Schumer)

Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette, Amy Schumer, and Julia-Louise Dreyfus sit down for an absurd send-off for Dreyfus’s so-called “last fuckable day.” There’s plenty of prodding at our vehemently male-centric culture, and the tipped scale when it comes to feminine looks, but you really shouldn’t need much more information than to see the women involved in this sketch to understand the level of talent and laughs involved.

"Sound Speakers" (Portlandia)

Though nothing in this season of Portlandia was quite as deliriously funny as "The Story of Toni and Candace," this sketch gets directly at the concepts of class, expertise, and modern technology vs. practical usage that have always been central to Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's show. In trying to set-up a state-of-the-art speaker system, SNL's Vanessa Bayer comes into contact with Armisen and Brownstein as absurdly thorough speaker installation specialists, and their attention to detail ends up usurping the usefulness of the product they're trying to sell and install. In this, the Portlandia team again depicts the positive inclinations, strangeness, and exhaustion of taking art seriously, and how studied, heartfelt skill can often get in the way of practicality.

"Meet Your Second Wife" (SNL)

In which Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have obscene amounts of fun giving a jolt to the old and disturbingly still accurate cliché of older rich men marrying young women nearly half their age or even less when their first marriages break apart. This is one of those perfect comedic engines that Saturday Night Live have become expert purveyors of, powered by exact and exacting cut-away shots, quiet facial reactions, and studied deliveries. The great, giddy elements here are Poehler and Fey, happily holding court over the misogynistic culture they’ve been battling from the beginning of their careers, while also sadly facing the fact that sleazy actions like this will continue on, despite their more-than-admirable objections.

"Outkast Reunion" (Key & Peele)

It’s easy to see where the embellishments are in this hugely funny send-up of the supposed rift between Andre 3000 and Big Boi of the seminal Atlanta-based hip-hop outfit Outkast; the latter member came out publicly to both tip his hat to Key & Peele and clear up that it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Still, any fan of this group – and there’s more than a few – had to get a chuckle out of how Key and Peele express the diverging musical routes that these two brilliant musicians have taken following the now-classic Stankonia album. And frankly, if Andre Benjamin were to drop that album of screeching metal sound, I’d be the first one to yell “shut up and take my money!”

"C*nt" (W/ Bob and Dave)

In confronting one of the more loathed words in the human language, Dave Cross and Bob Odenkirk not only provide a perfect caricature of the right-leaning sort of…person…who uses the word instead of simply expressing their anger more clearly, but also peck at their own reliance on clichés. Rather than simply continue ridiculing a preposterous brand of men, they toy with the mechanics of clichéd humor with wit and wildness, giving a swift reminder that a comedian’s best source of comedy is often sourced from one’s own behavior and taste.

"Football Town Nights" (Inside Amy Schumer)

Amy Schumer's uproarious take on Connie Britton's character in Friday Night Lights is frankly just the cherry on top of this comedic criticism of football's close, disturbing relationship with, and general acceptance of, rape. In the same year that The Hunting Ground came out, Schumer's sketch deploys the kind of laughs that are hard to swallow, especially when Josh Charles' take on Kyle Chandler's Coach has to field a never-ending number of variations on whether or not its okay to rape a woman. (In this, there's also a slight, undeveloped critique of the nation's lack of required sex education.) There's a boisterousness to this parody, a clear sense of nuance in how Friday Night Lights both honestly depicts and sugarcoats sports culture in the South, but Schumer's barely restrained fury is unmistakable in every bit of the sketch.