Race is slippery issue, especially when it comes to making jokes. A narrow line needs to be tread for fear of backlash, or worse, a silent and disappointed audience. Keith Farnan does a good job of keeping the issue away from any potential hazards while at the same managing to keep it funny.
I had never seen a comedy gig start off with a stop-motion Lego short before, especially not one with a Lego Hitler, but surely it was a sign of good things to come. Keith Farnan’s forty-minute show No Blacks, No Jews, No Dogs, No Irish, which played at Trinity’s Fringe Festival last Thursday, was filled with originality and some very funny moments, if at times a tad disturbing. For those expecting a deep debate on the problems and cures of racism, this was not your venue, but if you came for some topic humour, you were in for a treat.
Farnan’s epileptic stylings consisted of him running around the stage and using wild hand motions and loud voice to get his points across and it seemed to serve him well, ingratiating the full house at the Players Theatre to him, a difficult thing to do with such a touchy subject as racism. Jokes ranged from the Greeks (The Greeks gave us the Olympics, Philosophy, and Homosexuality, so if you lost in a race you were buggered… but at least you knew why) to Travellers (My grandmother used to tell us “THEY will literally sell your eye out of its socket. Of course she only had one eye so it scared the shit out of us) and everything in between. Despite having a few technical problems and having to check his notes Farnan did a good job of both bantering with the audience, improv-ing, and sticking to his scripted stuff. A few jokes poked at Ireland’s less-than stellar history of acceptance put the audience on familiar ground with the material, and it allowed Farnan to really do what he wanted. He plays his overgrown college kid routine very well, though somewhat laboured at times, especially with numerous references to how hungover he was. However it worked well with his college audience who laughed at every joke and even gave him a chuckle on his weaker jokes (Think “War on Terrier”).
One gets a sense very early on in his set though that there is not much difference between impromptu Fernan and set-list Fernn– they just seem to be exactly the same. Many of his jokes came from the rants he tends to go off on, slowly weaving his way back and forth around a point that never seems to get made. In trying to hit all bases while at the same time localizing the subject the material seems to go off and lose something solid that we should take away from the performance. With a longer set time and perhaps a little more effort on Fernan’s part we could have really learned something. But for less than a fiver, most people would have been more than happy with the laughs they got.
