When you go to your friends’ tongue-in-cheek world tour at Melbourne Fringe, you expect to have fun. What you don’t expect is for them to get uploaded to cyberspace in a post-ironic internet odyssey rap musical.

Young Squizzy and McRizz are the rapper personas of Melbourne comedians Louis Prandolini and Hugo Postregna. Their dynamic is well established in their 2026 album McSquizz: the effortlessly charismatic McRizz mentors the stressed-out and hyper-sensitive Squizzy through an unforgiving rap industry, teaching him about rizz, aura and being nonchalant.

Their world tour kicks off with some of the duo’s hit singles, including Chugging, Chalant and Cha Ching, and Young Squizzy’s solo effort, New Kicks. The allure of these songs is their weird humour (Cha Ching is an ironic pro-gambling song; Chugging is about the joys of drinking piss) and genuinely good wordplay, sung by rappers who claim to be at the top of their industry but sound anything but. 

The song Chalance, a candid look into Squizzy’s yearning for more rizz and less chalance, closes with an impassioned feud between Squizzy and McRizz concerning their strained mentor-mentee relationship. As the argument manifests physically in a tug of war using the wiring of their Fortnite game, they accidentally electrocute themselves and get uploaded into the game. What ensues is a veritable odyssey across the wasteland of an AI-rotted internet as Squizzy and McRizz try to return to their normal reality, all while surviving the dangers of the being online.

This was the show at its strongest and funniest: riffing off our generation’s knowledge of and discontents with an increasingly hostile online world to produce a piece of art that’s sincere, hilarious and mocking. 

The character of Mark Zuckaberg, for instance, alongside his henchman Claude, is portrayed as unequivocally evil, intent on destroying the young rappers for no reason beyond some nonsensical platitudes about the greater good. His most powerful weapon is the “doom scroll”, a scroll containing the entirety of the internet which anesthetises whoever looks upon it. This is straightforwardly taking the piss of how tech giants frack our attention for financial gain, and piss-taking is one of the best ways to discredit these modern-day despots. 

The internet influence extends beyond these characters and props, though. While following the yellow glitch road, Young Squizzy and McRizz joke about “motion” and “aura”, travel through the dark web and make a stop at an uncanny valley. They meet AI-generated characters, one of whom is “kirkified”, and Young Squizzy almost throws himself overboard upon hearing a Siren song—that is, a thirst trap. In an interview with Theatre Works, Postregna said the target audience was “chronically online”, and whilst I think a lot of the pun-based and physical comedy would rile up any demographic, much of this internet humour specifically was imminently generational. 

Although this quixotic journey was utterly facetious, the characters Young Squizzy and McRizz have personal transformations which lend the show some offline sincerity. Towards the end, Young Squizzy sings a candid acoustic track, just him and the guitar on stage, about how he needs to find his true self. Although this character growth felt a little contrived—Squizzy already showed us his honest side in the earlier Chalant—this track hammered home one of the show’s generationally important messages: know yourself, outside of an algorithmically mediated context. Algorithmic fragments and ironic facades aren’t sustainable bases for selfhood.

While Young Squizzy’s and McRizz’s opening songs were wittily bad to start, the brunt of the songs in the musical were genuinely impressive, with beautiful counterpoint vocal melodies and creatively mercurial moods. Mark Zuckaberg’s introductory song had particularly sinister chord progressions, and there were some individually brilliant vocal performances from the cast.

Nonetheless, some of the show was a little rough around the edges: minor audio issues, some missed lyrics, accidental bumps on stage, some timing off by a split second. This is to be expected with an opening night, but it also lent some credibility to the play. How human to have imperfections! Because it’s this imperfection, the play reminds us, that is the antidote to AI, to optimisation and to big tech’s fracking of our attention.

The final song of the show functions as a call to action to get your friends together and go outside. It’s an upbeat and optimistic reminder that, for a generation that has grown up with the internet our whole lives, we are not fated to stay on it forever. The way to escape the tech bro overlords and anaesthetising doomscrolls is simply to find community and touch grass. Really, the entire musical was this message in action, proof of its own imperative. At the end of the day, we are just like Prandolini and Postregna: we’re young people who crave hanging out, going offline and having fun. How poetic that Young Squizzy and McRizz: The World Tour gives us such a strong reason to do that.