Interview: Foil Arms and Hog, OinK
MoodyComedy spoke to Sean Finegan, Sean Flanagan and Conor McKenna, who make up the comedy sketch trio Foil Arms and Hog about their latest show, OinK…
You’re set to tour your latest show, OinK, throughout Ireland and the rest of the UK from February through to April, are you ready?
Absolutely. It’s our biggest tour yet, with the Eventim Apollo being the largest audience we will ever have played to in one night. We’re very excited.
How did you three meet, and how was Foil Arms and Hog formed?
We met at college when we were supposed to be studying. Then we started writing sketches when we were supposed to be getting jobs. Then during the recession there were no jobs, so we kept writing. Then years passed and we had deskilled so much since our degrees that we had to stick with the comedy.
What is the most challenging part of working as a comedy trio?
Looking straight into the other person’s eyes and saying “that’s not very funny”. Even harder is working on something all day then performing to two blank faces (I practice on manikins).
© Stephen Gallagher
You film sketches for your YouTube channel on a weekly basis, do you find that your live audiences are the same kinds of people, or do you think you’re hitting two different demographics?
The YouTube audience is incredibly diverse, we’re really popular in places like in India, Hong Kong and Burkina Faso. Unfortunately with audiences on the UK and Irish tour, Burkina Faso is still terribly underrepresented.
What would you like to get out of this tour?
Our live show is so much funnier than our YouTube sketches; we only make the videos to get people to come to the show. We really get a kick out of meeting the audience on the way out, chatting to them about their favourite video, the first time they saw us in a pokey pub 8 years previous, or the drunk audience member who kept heckling in 2010. That’s what we look forward to.
What have people who go to see OinK got to look forward to?
All the sketches that we thought were too good to give away for free on the internet. Plus there’s more characters in this year’s show than ever before, which means there can be so much more improvising. That’s when we start having fun. We do roughly two hours of sketches, the first half new, the second old favourites. There’s songs for the elderly, balaclava boutiques, wild apes settling their differences, motivational prison speakers and other sketches that can’t be as well described in a couple of words but it doesn’t make them any less funny.