Keith Farnan: No Blacks. No Jews. No Dogs. No Irish. All Welcome - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Keith Farnan’s show is inspired by the sort of shameful signs often seen in B&Bs in the Seventies. Only the one that caught his eye was in modern times, in the office of the American restaurant where he worked alongside a kitchen staff of intimidating toughguys from the Deep South. As an Irishman, he was obviously somewhat concerned…

Thus he has themed this year’s Fringe show around racism, a popular subject for comedy given how easily it is mocked, with special emphasis on the experiences of Ireland. A nation whose children have covered the globe but never, until the recent economic boom of the Celtic Tiger, experienced much immigration. Turns out that behind the image of Irish hospitality, prejudice lurks – just ask the Romanians hounded out of Dublin.

Farnan’s show is peppered with all manner of facts and anecdotes, from Rudyard Kipling’s hatred of the Irish to president Eámon de Valera’s refusal to take Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism because he thought that would lead to anti-Semitism, in a very peculiar appliance of logic.

As an animated, sometimes agitated, comedian, Farnan delivers at breakneck speed; chucking interesting information and witty asides into the mix liberally and quickly – but perhaps not all that carefully. There’s no strong though line that would make the material hang together better as a show, leaving it instead as a slightly slap-dash collection any scrap of half-decent stand-up material that’s loosely connected to the theme. You can’t fault his passion, but his train of thought is jumpy, so that every little routine might as well be preceded by ‘and another thing…’

An early segment about his own prejudice towards the Greeks, based on his time working on a Ireland-Wales ferry, seems slightly out of place – and making light of genuine hate-filled racism – while he occasionally reinforces some soft stereotypes, whether it be the Irish as drinkers or Australians and lewd crocodile-hunters, which equally doesn’t advance the argument.

But there are some fine jokes here, and always enough to keep you informed and entertained, with Farnan striving to avoid the most obvious angles – even if encountering a Muslim guy called Jihad is a temptation to much. Farnan may be in need of a director to untangle the jumble of material, but there’s a good comic mind at work here.