During high school, I had this habit of watching Comedy Central with an intense curiosity. I’d collect the names of comedians I found funny and do deep dives. I’d find the albums, study what little I could find, and watch the movies to see how they presented their voice. This was especially true of stand-up. Maybe, in hindsight, it related to my love of language, but there was something to how these artists presented the setup and execution of a punchline, where there were so many ways to say a very banal concept in surprising new ways. To say the most obvious sentence imaginable, I especially loved George Carlin and jumped at the chance to watch every HBO special when it made the rounds.
Somewhere in the mix was a comedian who felt really radical. It wasn’t because of anything he said being vulgar or life-changing. He was a man with a guitar and a sketchpad speaking in this flat affect while his bangs hung over his eyes. Something was begrudging about his involvement, like Comedy Central had plucked the biggest introvert in the world to do 40 minutes of whatever he wanted. In 2007, Demetri Martin was unlike anyone I had seen before. He was an artist who played with language and recreated the sight gag. It felt intellectual without needing a PhD. In short, he was on another level brilliant if you were a late Bush-era teenager.
It was only this past week that I discovered (quite happily) that Martin was still producing stand-up specials for Netflix. My concern was that he had been a flash in the pan, someone who was near impossible to market and thus never had a major career. In my mind, he fit in the same box as his Paper Heart (2009) co-star Lo Mutuc of people who were stuck in a niche, which, even in an era where most alternative comedians have a well-worn groove, only ever worked as the second or third guest on a late-night talk show to do five minutes. I worried that his brand of esoteric observations would never be seen again.
Enter Julio Torres. While I wouldn’t call them a one-to-one analog, they share enough of the social awkwardness that drives their stand-up that veers into the realm of an art piece. It didn’t take long for those comparisons to appear in Color Theories when Torres took to a drawing board while detailing his central concept that navy blue was a bad color. If there’s a major difference between Martin in 2007 and Torres in 2026, it’s that the latter appears to have more of a budget and a background in theater to make the evening more of an immersive maximalist opus. Upon building the stage like it’s a Talking Heads concert, he emerges from an indentation of a book in the floor. It’s an absurd entrance, but far from the most confounding idea that will unfold over the next 75 minutes. This is an evolution of the world I was gaga for nearly two decades ago, and I’m happy to say this is a downright masterpiece.
This isn’t my first time with Torres. In fact, my experience has largely been milquetoast where I land somewhere in the “appreciative” camp. Watching Problemista (2023) or his TV series Fantasmas, he came across as precocious, an intellect who fooled the world into funding his outsider art. Do I like it? In theory. However, it’s the type of surrealist comedy that insists upon itself. The ideas are vivid, but the revelation clashes too much with the punchline, leaving me incapable of comprehending which emotion I was supposed to take away. As a creative writer, I love that stuff. And yet, after two years of familiarity, he never made sense.
Then I watched Color Theories and found myself immediately on board with the prompt. With markers in hand and filters over the lights, he was about to tell me why navy blue was a bad color and yellow reflected youth. At the risk of giving away too much of his game, the thing that I was most drawn to was his confidence. This one-man show flows like a TED Talk run amok, incorporating PBS Kids’ edutainment elements in an effort to create this peaceful fever dream. This was the type of trust fall exercise whose risk asks you to buy into something illogical on the surface. Why would an adult be so obsessed with the emotionality of colors, and, better yet, why would anyone show up to hear his sales pitch?
Like the best of art, this is layered in metaphors within symbolism. What starts as jokes about Disney animals and New York’s Portal slowly reveals its intention as an existentialist study of society. For context, Torres is from El Salvador. Early in the show, he assumes that Latin America is a jumbled group of countries with similar ideologies. It wasn’t until he traveled that he found a greater truth lying in the minutiae. It wasn’t only from the region. He speaks of performing for wealthier estates in the United States and the jokes landing differently. There’s this disconnect from reason that reveals how this abstract painting that he’s scribbling is actually a study in cultural diversity.
The component that makes Julio Torres make sense is his ties to Latin America, a region whose art is known for embracing magical realism. I don’t wish to suggest that he’s Saturday Night Live’s answer to Jorge Luis Borges, but there is a shared density to the greater idea lying underneath. They’re both at times dry, obsessed with seemingly tangential concepts that eventually tie to the greater thesis. For Torres, those are the colors that, in themselves, evoke a youthful innocence hiding a deeper psychological truth. Another difference is that he is on the border of the post-modernist movement, where the closer he gets to finding meaning, the further he gets from convenience. Colors have meaning, and yet they can blend together and change into something more perverse. At some point, his theory falls into a pit of chaos if taken too literally, only saved by his robot companion, who, in the final 20 minutes, becomes an even more poetic metaphor for Color Theories as performance art.
As an immigrant, he’s also using his perspective to point out the conflict of America from an outsider’s perspective. Magical realism as a genre is open-ended to interpretation and the potential of everyday life. Anyone who has watched a local news channel in the U.S. will know the obsession with stocks. How many people actually care about Dow and Nasdaq? There’s this corporate drive that limits creativity in favor of selling a product. In an age where sociologists are actively studying the concept of enshitification, it feels like an implosion of cultural ideology, where The American Dream has turned into a macabre delusion for most.
Mainstream art is in a rough place. There’s a constant battle for stimulation beyond immediate dopamine rushes, and it’s hurt the concept of media literacy. I imagine for the general viewer, a show like Color Theories lacks appeal or, maybe more specifically, a punchline. There’s only the surface level for those unable to invest in the juvenile. Torres’ desire to strip back the grand concepts of life into something more basic requires effort to understand, where the punchline only arrives after a lecture overrun with detours. By engaging with complex ideas, Torres has implanted the idea of overthinking everything to question the constructs around us. Without stating directly, he has created a radical piece of art that could be mistaken for nonsense.
On the one hand, I’m sure teenage me wouldn’t have been able to understand the depth of Color Theories. Even if I figured out that navy blue was symbolic of “law and order,” what would that say about the more metaphysical elements? This isn’t just a study of society, it’s a commentary on our interiority and the search for a spiritual balance. In actuality, no color is inherently bad. It can embrace lightness or darkness. Some things can change.
I acknowledge that I spent more time running down the concept of the show than what made any of it actually funny. That’s because I find Torres’ approach to be largely intertwined with the high-wire risk of being too clever. His many asides and character beats enhance the commentary, allowing for humanity to seep through the dry academia. That, and the very concept is enough to call it ridiculous. Much like Rachel Bloom’s most recent special, this is soul-searching hidden within construct, creating an even more provocative study of what a stage can do. This may not titillate as much as HBO’s stand-up special by Sarah Sherman, but it’s helping to keep people curious, to know that beyond the boring colors is a deeper meaning.
I’m unsure if my newfound appreciation will lead to a reassessment of Julio Torres’ entire body of work. Maybe this is just a fluke. Maybe season two of Fantasmas will continue to feel precocious. It’s hard to say. I just love that in the process of breaking down the value of art to its most abstract layers, it helped me realize the value of his strange view of humanity. Not only that, but if this is the same brand of socially awkward guy with a sketchpad comedy that I loved in 2007, I’m curious to know how much weirder it’s going to get when the next guy comes out with an even crazier vision. For now, I’m lucky to exist in a time when artists like this are pushing boundaries and keeping the world from turning beige.
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