Julio Torres

He sits down at a small desk and waits for the room to stop making noise. When he speaks, it is barely above a whisper. He does not pace. He might point a camera at a small plastic toy or a geometric shape and begin to narrate its inner life. He sounds less like a comedian delivering a routine and more like a deposed royal dictating a memoir about his favorite trinkets.

Torres sits in a strange space between alt-comedy and performance art, drawing audiences who treat his sets like collective meditation. He commands theaters filled with people willing to lean forward and listen to an adult man argue about the emotional temperature of a color.

He ignores relatable human struggle entirely. He builds elaborate, rigid mythologies for items you can buy in the clearance bin of a craft store. If he decides a piece of acrylic is hiding a dark past, he will spend five minutes interrogating that past. When a crowd does not follow him into the weeds, he doesn’t bail out on the premise. He just looks mildly disappointed that they lack the sensitivity to understand the situation.

Before he started making his own television shows and directing films, his sensibility leaked into the mainstream through his writing for Saturday Night Live. The quiet, deliberate absurdity he wrote into sketches about sensitive boys gazing into plastic wells is the exact frequency he broadcasts on his own stage.