Comics sketch in birthday party

Foil, Arms and Hog have been six years on the road.

To celebrate, the trio — Seán Finegan, Seán Flanagan and Conor McKenna — are doing a birthday party gig of their madcap capers at Vicar Street on Saturday. The sketch group have been called different names by people over the years, including Hogs, Dogs and Legs as well as Hog, Farm and Oats, or so they say.

“When we started performing we were looking for a name. Seánie here beside me was the one who had to set up all the jokes. We ended up calling him the comedy foil, like Tito from the Marx Brothers — the boring part, just setting up all the gags for everyone else, and letting them run amok,” says Conor McKenna.

“I slagged Conor,” adds Seán Finegan, “because we tried to get him to play the straight man part. He’s really clumsy, all arms and legs. The last guy got Hog because he kept on hogging all the good lines, and the good parts. Say if Conor or I improvised a good line one night, something funny, and we’d go to say it again the next night and those exact words would be coming out of Hog’s mouth. He’d steal all our laughs, you know?”

The guys came together while goofing around at UCD’s Drama Society. On their first trek to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2009 they packed suits in their bags in case they were called for an awards ceremony. !Their show is a mix of sketches, stand-up and a gallery of oddball characters.

“We do a sketch where we talk gibberish,” says Flanagan. “We’re on stage, talking gobbledegook. We try and get an audience member to join in, to start talking gibberish. There’s one bit in it where I square up to one of the guys, where we’re going to start a fight in gibberish... We had one dude in Edinburgh a few years ago. He was a massive, big dude, bald head, bit of a beard on him, and I’m a small guy. As soon as I turned around and put my chest out, he did the same, put his hand into his mouth and took out his teeth like he was ready for a fight.”

McKenna adds: “Most of the ideas that we come up with now are when we’re messing around in the car or in the office, just joking, not even trying to write. Someone will say something. For instance, Seán here put a chair in front of his face and pretended to read a book as if the chair was his face. We thought that was really silly and stupid. That was the idea.

“We worked on it to come up with this sketch about a family with chairs for heads, and the daughter chair-head brings home a boyfriend who wasn’t a chair-head — he was human — and the Da has a pre-civil rights in America response to the human being. It’s like in the old film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, when the daughter brought home a black guy, and the racist father has a conniption. So we played that out with people with chairs for faces. We called the human the round-head or the roundodendron — they were all the racist slurs from the chair-heads.”

* Foil, Arms and Hog perform at 7.30pm, Saturday, April 12 at Vicar Street, 58-59 Thomas Street, Dublin 2. Further information: www.vicarstreet.ie.