Foil Arms and Hog


Foil Arms and Hog is an Irish sketch comedy group comprising Sean Finegan, Conor McKenna and Sean Flanagan. The group performs on TV, radio, the stage and online. The trio write, shoot and edit a new sketch every week in their office, releasing it for YouTube, Facebook and Instagram on IGTV. Foil Arms and Hog do not have a specific genre, and make sketches that are often observational and occasionally topical. Popular sketches released to YouTube include 'When Irish People Can't Speak Irish', 'An Englishman Plays Risk', 'WTF is Brexit', and 'How to Speak Dublin'. Foil Arms and Hog also perform live shows, primarily in Ireland and the United Kingdom, but also in the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and a number of runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The group's name evolved from nicknames each of the members had for each other, Foil being the comedy foil, Arms was 'All arms and Legs' and Hog because he ostensibly hogged the limelight.
, the group had just under a million likes and follows on Facebook and 380 thousand YouTube subscribers. As of May 2020, the group had 420 thousand YouTube subscribers and 84 million views.
The group formed in 2008, after the trio met at University College Dublin in the drama society, when they were studying architecture, genetics and engineering respectively. They were drawn together at first by a love of the TV show Father Ted and a common interest in comedy. This was at a time just after the financial crash, and the group say that it "was absolutely the best thing that could have happened. If the Celtic Tiger had still been going and all our mates were making shedloads of cash, we would have been under pressure to get proper jobs. But instead, we had the perfect excuse to play around for a while and see what happened." Another result of the crash was the rent on the office they use for their sketches being far cheaper, which they say helped make their enterprise viable.