Keegan-Michael Key has resurrected his beloved Key & Peele substitute teacher character for the 2026 Fifa World Cup, delighting fans.
While in attendance at Sunday’s match between Iran and Belgium in Los Angeles, the Emmy-winning comedian and former half of comedy duo Key & Peele, 55, partnered with Fifa to recreate the iconic 2012 Key & Peele “Substitute Teacher” skit.
The original sketch, which became one of the Comedy Central series’s most popular, saw Key step into the role of inner-city substitute teacher Mr. Garvey, who struggles to pronounce his students’ names as he takes attendance.
In the spoof clip shared on FIFAWorldCup’s TikTok account, Key reprised his role as Mr. Garvey. “I’m your substitute teacher today,” he announces, going on to call out French players Aurélien Tchouaméni, Kylian Mbappé, and Désiré Doué, Brazil’s Vinícius Júnior, Spain’s Lamine Yamal, Norway’s Erling Haaland, and England’s Jude Bellingham and Aaron Wan-Bissaka, comically mispronouncing their names.
For Wan-Bissaka, he revisited one of the most enduring mispronunciations from the original sketch: A-aron.
The clip, which has accumulated over 1 million likes so far, has left a strong impression on fans who remember the original.
“This skit was so monumental,” one fan commented, with a second agreeing it “will never get old.”
“Idk how but this healed me,” a third said, while a fourth declared: “We need content like this.”
“No A-Aron has been safe since that sketch,” another quipped. Several noticed the person filming’s muffled laughter and praised it as “the icing on the cake.”
“The camera guy giggling is hilarious,” one laughed.
Key co-starred alongside co-creator Jordan Peele in Key & Peele, which ran for five seasons on Comedy Central, from 2012 to 2015. They first worked together on the sketch series Mad TV between 2004 and 2009.
In recent years, however, the pair have stopped working together, with Key increasingly focusing on acting roles and Peele establishing himself as one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation. Their most recent project was the 2022 Henry Selick animation Wendell & Wild, for which they contributed vocal parts. Before this, the pair were last seen onscreen together in the 2016 film Keanu.
Speaking to People in 2024 about their friendship, Key revealed that they “don’t see each other that often anymore... which is, to me, a tragedy.”
“Your lives start to evolve and move in different directions,” he admitted. “Our evolution, I think, is tied to both of what our desires are. His desire was to start exploring the horror genre, and my desire was to do more dramatic work like I had been trained in school.
“Both of us jumped to another platform [following the success of Key & Peele], but we needed that first platform,” Key added.
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