Sick, shocking, mean, raw and uproariously funny are the hooks a lot of people hang onto when processing the psychopathic glory of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s scribblings.

For the last couple decades, McDonagh has carved out (literally, with whatever sharp, rusty tool happens to be nearby) a recognizable mold for himself–a template for his audiences—by repeatedly crafting characters and story lines that are distinct in their creativity as well as their deep and abiding nastiness.

There’s his first, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Galway’s answer to the 1962 Bette Davis camp piece, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, or maybe more fucked up version of The Glass Menagerie. (With ten times as much burning!)

More recently, McDonagh has meandered into film; he received a Best Original Screenplay nomination for In Bruges starring Collin Farrell as a hitman trapped in the clean and pleasant hellhole of touristy Belgian fairytale-land.

All this is just to say that it’s not far-fetched to expect that within the first two minutes of McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane, currently playing at the Keegan Theatre, a gun will bang loudly, followed by a gruff one-liner by the shooter.

What’s weird about writers who deal in dark comedy a lot, though, is that you begin to prep the giggles before you even go in, making you itchy on the laugh trigger when ordinarily you’d be paying better attention.

This was definitely the case with the Keegan audience the night I attended, who began to cackle loudly as soon as the lights went up on the handless protagonist Carmichael’s scowling face.

As Carmichael, Mark A. Rhea looks like if Ethan Hawke got mixed up in the wash with latter-day Nick Nolte. Carmichael is a homicidal maniac holed up in a dingy hotel room who has spent the better part of the last 30 years looking for his missing hand, which was chopped off as a kid by “rednecks” who held his arm down to railroad tracks. (This yields one of the best lines, “Do you know what it feels like to be waved goodbye from a distance with your own hand?”)

Carmichael is holding a hapless pair of pot dealers hostage, a couple named Toby (Manu Kumasi) and Marilyn (Laura Herren) who naively wandered into his relentless quest, thinking they could promise him a hand, take his money and run.

When A Behanding in Spokane premiered on Broadway, the character of Toby, a black man trapped in the same room with the unapologetically bigoted and dangerous Carmichael (“Okay Ma, I do find some black women attractive. That doesn’t mean I’m not racist,” he says, another of the night’s best lines), was widely criticized for falling into the trappings of heavy stereotype.

In fact, Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker that Anthony Mackie’s performance as Toby was like “Stepin Fetchit in a room full of bickering ghosts.”

At the Keegan, to the credit of both director Colin Smith and the acting chops of Manu Kumasi, Toby is a more layered performance than what it sounds like went into the Broadway show (which I didn’t see). Toby is a more fully formed character, yes, but that only serves to accentuate some of the failings in the script.

Unfortunately, McDonagh trips over himself over and over. It makes sense that someone like Carmichael would casually throw out the n-word. But then all of the other white characters randomly throw out terms “mongoloid” and “colored.” Randomly, casually, seemingly without purpose, except maybe shock value, but even the “shock” feels, I guess, disjointed. Distracting? WTF?

These attempts to understand and make fun of (one supposes?) a kind of in-your-face offensiveness feels merely foreign and odd in the play. Like when Michael Haneke made that shot-for-shot remake of “Funny Games” that was supposedly set in “America” but still felt very, very German.

Racism has been mocked and skewered to great effect by writers who really get it. But I just don’t think McDonagh gets it.

This is exemplified at one point when Marilyn asks her crying boyfriend, “Where’s your black power shit now? Fight the power?”

Har har?

Then there’s one of Toby’s big zingers, something along the lines of how you can’t really talk back to someone who’s “waving a hand around like a Kentucky Fried Chicken wing,” that just falls flat.

Which is a shame, because a lot of this play is hilarious.

Bradley Foster Smith as Mervyn, the loopy, deranged guy working the hotel’s front desk, lights up the stage whenever he appears, a fearless-by-way-of-insanity grin stretched across his face. He also gets one of the strangest, most enjoyably twisted monologues plopped down smack in the middle of everything (venturing into the audience and getting one woman in the front row to pull his finger like she’s the gibbon he fell in love with at the zoo).

We are also treated to a kind of snowball fight only replacing snow with severed hands, lots of them, all rubbery and red.

This isn’t McDonagh at his best, but it’s still entertaining enough when he sticks to what he’s good at—namely, anything but “talking in a nuanced way about race in America.”

A Behanding in Spokane runs through April 7 at the Church Street Theater (1742 Church Street NW). Tickets $30-35.