The real big belly laugh _{by Alessia Belsito-Riera}

The last time the sketch comedy trio Foil, Arms & Hog were in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, they threw bread at the audience pretending they were ducks.

“We tried to throw a slice of bread to the back of the room, but we had gotten this really flimsy bread”. Then, someone yelled out that they should use Vogels, Conor McKenna (Arms) says. “So at half time, one of us ran out the back door to a shop, bought it, pegged it back, and then produced this brick of a bread, and it just pinged off the back!”

Now the internet sensations return to Wellington’s St James Theatre on the 5^th of June with Skittish and an armoury of Vogels.

Conor, how did you three go from studying engineering, architecture, and genetics to comedy?

I wanted to be a stand-up… so anyway, the lads are holding me back. Hog (Sean Flanagan) wanted to be an actor and I think Foil (Sean Finegan) probably wanted to be an architect. Thankfully, there was a massive recession and there were no jobs. I still remember my first job. I was holding this sign that said ‘Comedy this way’ in the centre of Temple Bar. I was so excited about it because it meant I got paid 30 euro and I got seven minutes on stage. My mother, who did not understand this at all, just saw, like, ‘He's graduated from genetics now he’s holding a sign – the country’s in ruins!’ So anyway, I was delighted.

We were thrown together and then we just went from gig to gig. Comedy is one of those things that if you do a good gig, it's a great feeling – a room full of people laughing at what you have to say, and you’re doing it with your pals. We all wanted to work together to make people laugh. And it’s rarer than you think, that teamwork. I think that’s what kept us together over the years.

What do you love about comedy?

The real goal of comedy is if you can get people to laugh at the absolute stupidest thing that you can think of. That real big belly laugh. That’s what I love. I don't really want to make people think, people have enough time to think. I don't want to teach them anything – I know there's a lot of that in comedy at the moment, but that’s definitely not us.

Tell me about Skittish!

Our show is very interactive. We talk to loads of people at the start, and then we use all of their stories to inform the sketches. It means that every single show is different. Otherwise it's just you doing the material and then going home. We really want to be there, to have that live experience with the audience. The show is hard to describe. First off, it's none of the material that is on our YouTube channel. It’s much more surreal. We've got about 12 sketches, three songs, Irish traditional songs, a cappella songs, and they're all silly. We've got a sketch about a zoo that's 100-percent humane because the owner has replaced all of the animals with amateur actors, but he's still treating it like a regular zoo so it's falling apart. It's just bat sh*t, basically!