Being biracial has been a source of comedic material for Key, who told Terri Gross in an interview for NPR that "I think the reason [Key and Peele co-star Jordan Peele and I] became actors is because we did a fair amount of code switching growing up, and still do."[1][2] In 1989, he graduated from Shrine Catholic High School in Royal Oak, Michigan. Key attended the University of Detroit Mercy as an undergraduate and earned his Master of Fine Arts in Theater at Pennsylvania State University.[3] While at The University of Detroit Mercy, he was a brother of Phi Kappa Theta. He later discovered the identity of his birth mother, and that he had two half-brothers who were both already deceased, one of them comic book writer Dwayne McDuffie.[4][5]