These guys are ingenious comics and excellent actors. They are the three anti-stooges: nobody's fools and nobody's victims.

They work the ethnic minority vein of standup and sketch comedy with real elegance. Allan Axibal is Filipino American. Miles Gregley is African American. Rafael Agustin is from Ecuador. All three grew up in middle-class Los Angeles. They went to public schools. They were on the debate team together at Mount San Antonio Community College. From there they all went on to study theater at UCLA. Since 2003, they have been touring a show that has an unspeakable (let alone unprintable) name. But they do speak it. Loud. And a lot. Let's just call it "N*W*C." It is currently playing at the Kirkland Performance Center.

The "N*W*C" team's shtick bounces between clever jokes based on stereotypes to pungent stories based on personal experiences.

They have a message -- "There's only one race, the human race" -- that really doesn't lend itself to humor or anything else. It's very familiar. But, in a context of sharp wit and virtuoso acting, the message is harmless.

Some of the "N*W*C" material is rowdy. But even the standard guy guffaws about penis-size preconceptions are surprisingly inventive. As Axibal puts it, he has aspired to "more Cauc (sound it out) and less Asian." And then there's Axibal's Tom Cruise moment when he bounces around in white briefs.

Agustin's adventures include futile idealization of Ronald Reagan, semi-successful passing for an Anglo and a surprise transition from illegal to legal status (he flashes the green card for all to see.)

Gregley recalls high-anxiety efforts to master ghetto walk, talk and couture when he moved with his mother from the San Fernando Valley to a black neighborhood in Atlanta. Alas, "You can take the boy out of the Valley, but you can't take the Valley out of the boy." And what's so awful about a black kid taking George Michael as a role model?

For poignancy there's Gregley's initial discovery of the N-word when his seventh-grade class read "Huckleberry Finn." Axibal was disheartened when he found out about "the surgery," a procedure that makes Asian eyes look more Caucasian. And Agustin tells of how his parents, both physicians in Ecuador, worked washing cars and stocking market shelves in L.A.

For wacko wildness there are fantasy moments involving a Latino Jesus, an Asian Superman and a black pope ("Kiss the bling, my son"). Affording a good-faith effort at full-service minority awareness, there's a hallucinatory scene set in a gay club.

Though they touch on fear and hostility as a complication of minority life, the "N*W*C" team doesn't go into poverty and class conflict. An oddity of American life is that we've had so many waves of immigration, so much ethnic diversity and such a lot of racial tension that issues of poverty, crime and violence are seen as matters of national origin, ethnicity and race.

Axibal, Agustin and Gregley are middle-class, well-educated professionals. And surely they would run as fast as any Caucasian were they to be confronted by poor, unemployed, school dropout gang-bangers from East L.A. or Compton. But that wouldn't be at all funny.