“We came here to worry!” bellows an unhinged Gavin Pounds in one of the funniest sketches of the very funny 100% Real Human, Second City Toronto’s 92nd Mainstage Revue. His character has decided that a stand-up comedian is not delivering sufficiently dark and disturbing laughs – so he’s pushing … hard.
There is some truth to the line. At a show like 100% Real Human, we may not exactly want to worry, but we are happy to sit in our discomfort and laugh at it… nervously, maybe a little too loudly. Right now, we’re all breathing a toxic cloud of fear gas about the lightning-fast development of Artificial Intelligence, and its implications for writing, art, work – and the viability of anything that is “100% real human.”
So this is the right revue for the zeitgeist, and it lives up to its premise in a quirky, hilarious and ultimately reassuring way. The tone is set by the throwback 1970s vibe of the promotional material: it’s all warm colour stripes and big squishy letters that conjure an earthier, less techno-mediated time and place. And the cast take us there (metaphorically), as soon as we clear the cute opening song, which acknowledges the technological elephant in the room (ok, on the stage).
The show, directed breezily by Rob Baker and scored slyly by Music Director Steve Cruickshank, finds the funny in a succession of incontestably human situations, which, AI be damned, aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon. Most of them revolve around communication — the gap between what we think and what we say … which, if you think about it, is where our humanity lives. These take the form of resonant sketches about our self-talk during hated corporate icebreakers, local politicians doing karaoke… together, and audience interaction that mines clever communication restrictions for laughs.
The show boasts a diverse cast of comedians with different strengths and the shared ability to hit my funny bone consistently. Tim Blair as a gruff barber and Gavin Pounds as his confused client combine on a gut-busting masterpiece of opaque communication and contortionism. Pounds and Chelsea Larkin, with a wacky assist from Antony Hall, bring the fake politeness of a first sleepover to hilarious life. Monica Garrido Huerta leans into her Mexican-ness in a pair of delightfully over-the-top sketches featuring Blair as her straight man: first, she plays a driver who may be stuck in traffic but will not be stuck there in silence, and then she delights as a singer with her own agenda. Meanwhile, Hall, with the aid of Larkin’s nutty turn as “Doc”, goes Back to the Future -style into his past to encourage his young Asian self. It’s a silly, surprisingly sweet sketch that endorses the idea of our social progress, then ends on just the right techno-counterpoint. And finally, Gillian Bartolucci delivers delightfully deranged physical comedy in sketches as a righteously homicidal slo-mo dancer and an Uber passenger with a blind spot.
One outlier in these humanity-centered sketches is Pounds’ on-the-nose turn as a twisted version of song-and-dance man Willy Wonka, whose chocolate factory is now a data centre. With dark, funny turns as the kids by Hall, Blair and Larkin … and Garrido Huerta as an Oompa Loompa, the show’s subtext becomes overt, comedically stripmining our AI anxieties. If we do truly “want to worry”, well, this is a moment when the cast gleefully obliges … by stepping hard on that nerve. And they follow it later with an alien invasion skit that asks us to plead for humanity’s worth (spoiler alert: results are hysterically, humanly … middling to poor).
It’s abundantly clear that no algorithms were harmed (or consulted) in the making of this show. This Mainstage Revue is unmistakably the product of six gloriously weird minds, one director who turned them loose, and a music director who knew just when to underscore the madness.
100% Real Human? Certified and authenticated. And 100% real hilarious.
100% Real Human runs approximately 90 minutes plus one intermission at The Second City Toronto Mainstage, 110 Harbour Street. For tickets and showtimes, visit secondcity.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
