Foil Arms & Hog’s show a stand-up and sketch hybrid
With more than one billion views online, Irish trio Foil Arms and Hog are one of the internet’s most renowned comedy sketch groups, but live performance is where they truly thrive.
Having previously sold out the Hammersmith Apollo, New York Town Hall and more than 26,000 tickets at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe – they have been the top-selling act at the festival for three consecutive years – Foil Arms and Hog present Hogwash, a mix of sketches, improvisation, audience participation and talking suitcases.
The show, which is coming to Cambridge in October, has plenty of music too, including a parody of ‘Every Musical Ever’ and a rock anthem from a group of octogenarians looking to escape a retirement home.
Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from their office in Dublin “on an industrial estate, in a warehouse that we share with an engineering company and a solicitors”, the trio reveal they are writing their next sketch, which they intend to put online three days later.
“That’s the routine Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – Thursday go live,” explains Foil (aka Sean Finegan).
Hog (aka Sean Flanagan) says: “The fun part is it just feels like a continuation of our university experience, where we played dress-up for three years – it basically feels like that.
“Every Thursday we put out a few fake wallpapers and chairs and do something that we’ve written in the office during the week, and no one tells us not to do it. Maybe they should sometimes but they don’t! There’s nobody in charge, it’s just us.”
Arms (aka Conor McKenna) interjects: “It’s a really fun way to promote the gigs. That’s what we have the most fun doing, I guess, but we’ve just become known more for the videos, which is weird.”
Foil Arms and Hog’s best-known online sketches include ‘Getting Past US Immigration’, ’Quarantine Maths Class Disaster’, ‘An Englishman Plays Risk’ and ‘How to Speak Dublin’.
Their sketches have been shared in more than 150 countries and on the Chinese equivalent of YouTube (Bilibili), the trio have gained one million subscribers, making them one of the top foreign acts on the platform. Their celebrity fans include Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson, Key and Peele and Woody Harrelson.
On what the Cambridge audience can expect, Foil says: “The live show is very different from the videos online...”
Arms notes: “Well they’re funnier for a start because they have to be – there’s like a thousand people you have to make laugh all at the same time, whereas with video you don’t know who’s not laughing at any particular moment.
“The show has to be funny and make people laugh because otherwise everyone else in the room will notice.”
He continues: “The show itself is like a collection of sketches and we use a little bit of audience interaction, a little bit of what’s happening in the room and who’s there, and we’re going to trickle that through the sketches throughout the show and it culminates in a big climax at the end involving some of that stuff that we’ve got from the audience.”
Hog observes: “It’s quite different, I think, to how people know sketch comedy in the UK, because of the way we had to develop it.
“In Ireland, there’s no sketch comedy scene so we did the stand-up scene. So we weren’t allowed to have lights up and lights out, we weren’t allowed to have any fancy tech – so it’s almost like a hybrid between stand-up comedy and sketch comedy, it’s quite loose.
“Every show’s a little bit different and not too much tech reliance, just like the way stand-up would do it.”
Foil Arms and Hog will be appearing at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Thursday, October 26. Tickets, priced £26 and £28, are available from cornex.co.uk. For more on the trio, go to foilarmsandhog.ie.