‘Intermission!’: Reading Race in the Objects of Key & Peele ’s ‘Othello Tis My Shite’

The Key & Peele comedy sketch “Othello Tis My Shite” (2013) imagines two black men in early modern England reacting to a performance of Shakespeare’s drama. It depicts two black men responding to Shakespeare’s Othello outside the Globe Theatre during intermission in a format similar to their popular “Valets” sketches. The sketch presents complicated circuits of visual and verbal reference, alluding to Langston Hughes’ “Shakespeare in Harlem” and Shaft as well as As You Like It, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, and portraits of Sir Walter Raleigh. In “Alien Shakespeares 2.0,” This chapter uses “Othello ‘Tis My Shite” as a case study to test the limits of integrating OOO with critical race studies by treating each reference—verbal and visual—as an object according to Christy Desmet’s definition. It interrogates whether reading networks of reference with or without Shakespeare as an object in the sketch facilitates resistance to what Stuart Hall refers to as the binary code making race. It also questions if doing so requires refashioning the “alien” in “alien phenomenology,” which seeks to decenter the white male human, perhaps at the expense of reinforcing the marginalization of (O)thers. By evoking (O)ther voices with the Bard, “Othello Tis My Shite” interrogates whether artistic objects that cite Shakespeare can exist alongside—and even prior to—the Bard rather than derive from him.