Gillian Bartolucci and Monica Garrido Huerta in World’s Gone Wild.Arthur Mola/Supplied
- Title: World’s Gone Wild
- Written and performed by: Gillian Bartolucci, Tim Blair, Antony Hall, Monica Garrido Huerta, Chelsea Larkin, Gavin Pounds, Lance Oribello
- Director: Kyle Dooley
- Company: The Second City
- Venue: Second City Mainstage
- City: Toronto
- Year: Tickets on sale for performances up to July 26, 2026
You know this guy. He sits toward the back of the comedy club, chuckling but never laughing at full tilt. He’s having an okay time, but he’s mostly relieved it’s not him up on that stage, improvising and making animal noises for a paying crowd.
All of a sudden, a spotlight illuminates, searching the audience for the perfect mark. Bingo: There he is. His tie’s askew – it’s easy to fantasize that he works on Bay Street, that he’s had a long day in some half-empty office with an expensive-smelling lobby.
Before long, the Second City ensemble gets to work, asking their reluctant volunteer questions about his job. (He has one of those careers whose title tells you nothing: He works in “experience design,” and offers no follow-up explanation.)
Bartolucci, Tim Blair, Garrido Huerta, Tony Hall, Chelsea Larkin, and Gavin Pounds in World’s Gone Wild.Arthur Mola/Supplied
The Second City cast works their magic, and turns an awkward exchange with the unnamed volunteer into the highlight of World’s Gone Wild, the company’s 91st mainstage revue. They build a story around “experience design” (repeatedly asking the crowd what the hell that even is), and make the moment so silly that even Mr. Bay Street starts to laugh.
It’s a sequence that epitomizes this year’s cast’s greatest strength: their ability to adapt. On the night I attended World’s Gone Wild, cast member Antony Hall was out and replaced by understudy Lance Oribello, who before long emerged as a standout in the ensemble. Repeated bits about rats – specifically, New York mayor Rat Rudy Giuliani and, by extension, Rat 9/11 – were hilarious, edgy without being offensive and always surprising. Oribello didn’t miss a beat in World’s Gone Wild’s scripted sketches and in multiple instances even elevated the cast’s improv work. Nicely done.
In comedy – as in life – knowing when to change course is crucial. You have to be able to assess when a joke isn’t landing, or when it’s time to vault up the stakes of a given sketch.
Larkin in World’s Gone Wild.Arthur Mola/Supplied
For the most part, World’s Gone Wild knows when to say when. Only a few bits drag on too long – an opening musical number that rips off First Impressions from the musical First Date, for instance, and the dance numbers that see cast member Monica Garrido Huerta become overly shouty.
But the rest of World’s Gone Wild ticks along like a tandem bike, from well-meaning jokes about Toronto’s steel-industried, southwestern neighbour to edgier jabs at the Epstein files and, given the time of year, Easter.
That said, not everything quite works: The Second City’s sound design regularly muffles performers as they sing (and there’s quite a bit of singing in this year’s revue). Garrido Huerta’s not the only cast member to get shouty, as well – the whole cast sometimes gets overly swept up in what they’re doing, which gets unfunny fast.
Pounds and Blair in World’s Gone Wild.Arthur Mola/Supplied
But there’s lots to laugh at in World’s Gone Wild, from Tim Blair’s reliably excellent one-liners to Gavin Pounds’s grounded approach to working with an audience. (Pounds’s “post-nut clarity” scene is among the show’s high points.) Gillian Bartolucci and Chelsea Larkin both have quotable, quippy bits as well.
It’s worth noting, though, that there’s a distinct departure from the “elbows up” ethos that shaped last year’s revue. World’s Gone Wild doesn’t celebrate the United States, exactly, but it doesn’t uniformly dunk on it, either – “New York Minute,” an improv game that shaped the show’s third act on the night I attended, romanticizes the Big Apple as much as it pokes fun at the country the city inhabits. The revue’s sharper jokes aren’t at the expense of Trump or his cronies – they’re less specific, shrouded in a general nostalgia for the 1990s and framed by semi-successful magic tricks.
Even so, the Second City is one of Canada’s most glorious exports – it’s hard not to feel greats like Catherine O’Hara on the breath of the company’s new generation of comics. Did everything in World’s Gone Wild work for me? Clearly not. But the revue got people like me and people like Mr. Bay Street laughing at the same jokes about rats, corny sales pitches and Jesus Christ – and in a world as wild as this one, who could be mad at that?