The letter Q is lonely and purple is sassy: What can we learn from fonts and colours?

Julio Torres is quite a get for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. He’s a former Saturday Night Live writer who went on to write and star in cult HBO comedies Los Espookys and Fantasmas, and write, direct and star in the acclaimed film Problemista, co-starring Tilda Swinton. People with HBO and A24 on speed-dial rarely make stopovers on the Melbourne stage.

“This is interesting because they didn’t ask me,” he tells me from his home in New York. “I asked them if I could come. They very graciously said yes.”

Comedian Julio Torres Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Torres is presenting Color Theories, an experimental live show he’s developing for a forthcoming TV special. He has a knack for personifying the intangible, from fonts to letterforms to colours. The letter Q is lonely and misunderstood, an artist ahead of his time. The colour purple is sassy and conspiratorial.

For this show, as the title suggests, he’s returning to colours. “It’s a way of understanding human beings, power structures, and the way we move around the world,” he says. “I’m constantly trying to understand why things are the way they are.”

Torres is keen to impress on audiences that they’re coming to see something very experimental. His work is driven by something deeper than a quick laugh. It’s surreal and singular, the product of an anxious mind. Is there a catharsis in its creation?

“I don’t know if it’s cathartic, because I don’t seem to get any better,” he says. “It’s just honest. I think bureaucracy as a trigger for anxiety is my biggest thing.”

‘I thought I was being so clever. It ended up being a lot more expensive.’

Julio Torres, filmmaker and performer

Torres grew up in San Salvador, and moved to New York to go to college, and within a few years he was a writer on Saturday Night Live, where his personal, idiosyncratic quality sat wonderfully at odds with the show’s broad satire and impressions. He wrote the legendary Papyrus sketch, in which Ryan Gosling plays a man whose life is ruined by his obsession with the font choice for the Avatar film poster. Then there’s my own favourite, Wells for Boys, which he co-wrote with Jeremy Beiler – an advertisement for a toy well that lonely, sensitive boys can gaze longingly into while their peers play with water pistols.

“He’ll grow up to have a wildly passionate and successful creative life,” the narrator concludes, “but not just yet.”

“That one is very autobiographical, for sure,” he says. “That’s actually a beautiful thing for you to quote, because I have to remind myself that I do have a nice life and I have to worry a little less.”

His struggles with work visas and precarious living fuel his most personal works, Problemista and Fantasmas. Both are absurd, fantastical creations. Fantasmas is surrealism on SSRIs. It sees a fictionalised version of Torres go on an endlessly branching quest to avoid applying for his Proof of Existence paperwork. Tiny, abstract problems become consciousness-consuming obsessions in a dreamy, illogical world. In a time when glossy, expensive shows all look the same (“like credit card commercials,” as Torres puts it), Fantasmas is shot on half-constructed sets with striking design work. It’s like being captive in his head. I had assumed the idea came from budgetary constraints.

Torres in a scene from Fantasmas.

“Here’s the thing,” he says. “I thought I was being so clever. It ended up being a lot more expensive. It became like a puzzle of time and money. If this set can no longer have walls, and it’s just floor and furniture, what does that do to the costuming, to the jokes, to the story?”

“It was very limiting but in ways I found exciting,” he says. “I thrive within limitations. I have a lot of self-imposed limitations. Like being vegan.”

And after working with a feature film budget, what could be more limiting than confining himself to one person, one stage, on the other side of the world?

Melbourne is a way of leaving his comfort zone. The show is written, but he’s experimenting and fine-tuning it.

“It’s just about finding all the possibilities within those limitations,” he says. “I’m interested to see how the show will feel in a place that’s completely foreign to me, where I am completely foreign to the audience,” he says. “I’m being led by curiosity: about the world, and about the show.”

Torres will continue to bounce between mediums – and he’s looking to new limitations for the future.

“I think, like, maybe I should do something underwater,” he says. “Where everything is underwater.”

That doesn’t sound easy, I say. It actually sounds expensive.

“Well you don’t have to have hair and make-up,” he says. He thinks about it for a second. “Yeah, probably. That’s more a James Cameron kind of thing.”

Julio Torres is performing Color Theories at Max Watt’s until April 20.

The Age is a Melbourne International Comedy Festival partner.

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