Color Theories By Julio Torres stays outside stand-up's lines

You can’t quite call what Julio Torres does stand-up comedy. The star of the movie Problemista and the HBO shows Los Espookys and Fantasmas recasts the format as performance art, replacing the stool and microphone stand with elaborate set designs, colorful costumes, and interactive props, all in service of creating his own little whimsical, surreal worlds from which to comment on the real one. It leads to comedy that’s uniquely personal but almost never confessional, with Torres revealing little about his own life beyond some basic details. He’s interested in the big picture and how emotions define us. And yet, through it all, he retains a firm grasp on what matters most to a comedian: the comedy.

Torres might eschew the set dressing and stylistic clichés that stand-up is known for, but his rhythm and structure are clearly informed by it. That’s why he was such an exciting, electrifying presence at the start of his career, when he was still working clubs and before he became successful enough to control how his shows were presented. He knows what to keep from stand-up and what to toss out and how to reformat what stays in a way that appeals to a different audience without alienating the form’s fans.    

Color Theories capitalizes on stage design and dramatic conceits even more than My Favorite Shapes, his 2019 HBO special, did. The fairytale-inspired set looks like a large open book, with Torres emerging from its pages through a hole that resembles his silhouette, cartoon-style. He uses colored markers to draw on the oversized paper that surrounds him, visualizing his ideas on the attitudes and emotions signified by specific hues. There’s even a second character, the Fantasmas robot Bibo, who regularly interjects and converses with Torres, challenging the very concept of Color Theories in the climax. (Torres makes a point to distinguish Bibo from justifiably hated artificial intelligence; the adorable little robot is “more like a Pinocchio or Frankenstein situation,” he explains.)

Torres’ theory here is that every color represents an emotion and understanding them helps you understand how the world works. And although his observations about color are often weighty and prescient, they’re not preachy. They’re consistently funny and only didactic as a plot point late in the show. They also reveal canny insight into human behavior, such as how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is clearly orange, what Torres calls “the midpoint between childlike wonder [yellow] and rage [red].” He then explains, “We love our male celebrities to be orange—exciting but not dangerous” and contrasts that with how women can’t show any hint of red in public without damaging how others view them, using Real Housewives and Ellen DeGeneres as proof of inherently red women trying to hide their true natures behind other colors.