“Who’ve you talked to so far?” we ask them one morning, as they claim they spend months researching their city-specific shows, like the 59 performances they gave in Boston, or their stints in San Fran, Miami, Houston, New York.

The tres hombres answer like we suspected they would, with a nod to Orange County’s No. 1 Latino son, the author of OC Weekly’s “Ask a Mexican!”

“So far, it’s you and Gustavo.”

One of them interrupts, aware they’ve just copped to a certain laissez faire attitude regarding their show.

“But we’ll talk to everyone: janitors, Loretta Sanchez, a whole cross-section. It’ll be good!” he promises, and then, when asked just what they know about Orange County, delivers a thesis on Social Distortion, on OC’s tattooed grease monkeys, and how they, in this county, are the honest citizens, the straights. “You’ve got the sheriff, the archdiocese,” he says disapprovingly. “Social D are telling the story of the working class, talking straight to the audience.” He doesn’t mention No Doubt, or maybe he does. He’s got all his OC bases covered. One of them has inlaws in SanTana; they may be putting off their homework, but they’ve been around this block and plenty others. They figure they’ll do just fine.

Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza are dapper men of very fine hats. They’re quick, and have honed their patter over 23 years together, ’til it’s difficult to keep track of who just said what. After a long, lazy chat about Poor Britney Spears, Mexicans in car trunks, and politics (a plurality of them, pre-primary, were tending toward Hillary), we’ve been begging them to cancel their photo shoot at the beach tonight, and come speak to our college class instead.

The night’s topic is the CIA in Latin America, the School of the Americas (where your better dictators and guerrilla assassins were trained at US taxpayer expense), all your typical leftist-professor pap—we could ask for nothing better than Culture Clash to show up and do, oh, Roberto D’Aubuisson as Macbeth maybe, or Pinochet as Richard III. We’re having a fine time envisioning what they could do on the United Fruit Company off the top of their heads—on top of Culture Clash’s general bitchenness and informed-activist knowledge, Siguenza is himself a lecturer in Latin American studies at Cal State Northridge. Perfect. We won’t have to do our homework at all!

“You don’t want to go to the beach for the whole day,” we try to convince them. “You’re gonna be all sunburned, wind-chapped . . .”

And practically in unison, they continue the thought for us: “Deported . . .”

Doesn’t matter if you stage updates of Aristophanes’ The Birds at some of the country’s most respected theaters—or even if, for a moment, you had a sketch show on Fox—if you’re a dude from East L.A., people will still yell at you to go back to Mexico.

Culture Clash is a comedy troupe whose most consistently garnered adjective is edgy; do they worry that one day they’ll wake up and make Cheaper by the Dozen 3?

“We’re not a comedy troupe, we’re a performance trio,” Ric Salinas says mock-scoldingly. “I hate theater,” we reply. “We’re a comedy troupe,” he intones, his timing as clean as an OCD-sufferer’s hands.

“If we ever start doing an oldies tour, we’ll quit,” Richard Montoya tells us. “We just don’t have it in us.”

They put on their hats, do some kung fu for the camera, and then they’re off to the beach—laughing defiantly in the face of the sun, the wind and la migra.

Tags: comedy, culture clash, Orange County, south coast rep, Theater