Julio Torres Thinks Most Comedy Is Too Easy (Published 2022) (2024)

“I think with me,” Julio Torres says, “it’s like I have some things that I want to show people that are incidentally funny. Therefore the box that I check is comedy.” It’s tricky to imagine, for those of us more earthbound than Torres, what other lone box his otherworldly work might check. The digital shorts he wrote for “Saturday Night Live,” where the El Salvador native made his name in comedy and which he left in 2019, could be gorgeously melancholy and surreal in addition to funny. Same goes for his great HBO special “My Favorite Shapes.” In that sparkling hour of television, Torres, dressed in a retro sci-fi silver spacesuit get-up, wrung laughs — and sly political commentary about identity and difference — from the stories he told about the inner lives of small objects. On “Los Espookys,” the bilingual HBO sitcom he created with Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen, he plays an entitled and blinkered rich boy and magically makes the character’s bewilderment at the workaday world charming. (The show began its second season in September.) In each case, Torres’s work draws its energy from whimsy and delight rather than ridicule or satire, and has an air of guileless and childlike poetry that’s rare, maybe even wholly unique, in contemporary comedy. That’s if, as Torres suggests, comedy is even what he’s doing. “I like to show things to make sure that people don’t miss them,” says Torres, who this year also published a children’s book, “I Want to Be a Vase.” “Or things that people knew existed but never paid much attention to.”

When Bowen Yang interviewed you for the 92nd Street Y this June, you said to him that part of why superhero movies are so popular is that they’re morally easy stories for people living in a morally complicated world. Does the same desire for simplistic morality apply to the audience for comedy? Well, there’s a sense of doom around us. There’s this numbing hum of peril, and because of that I think there is less patience for ambivalence or nuance. So, yeah, there is this expectation to see goodness in comedy. Also, I just wrote a children’s book. When you’re writing a children’s book, you have to be mindful of what the message is. You have a sense of responsibility because these are not fully formed people absorbing this message. Presumably, when you’re writing something for an adult, you don’t have to handhold in the same way. Yet comedy is doing so much of that now. It’s almost like people are treating audiences as children. Like, look at this type of person having this type of story, and that is good! Then the audiences are like, yes, that is good! Then everyone pats one another on the head.

But how do you think about addressing moral issues or politics in your work? Because it’s there. You just come at it from oblique angles. My morals are aligned with all these ideas of representation and identity. I just choose to be less prescriptive and to show people things in unexpected ways rather than being overt about it in a way that is condescending. Also, I do the work that I do because I’m interested in showing people new things. Not because I’m interested in checking boxes.

Fred Armisen had a quote about you where he asked, “Who immigrates and becomes a comedian — and a successful one?” The fact that you did, along with your willingness to have audiences come to you rather than the other way around, speaks to a pretty high degree of self-assurance. I don’t think of comedians as always the most self-assured people. So where does that confidence come from? Or, to put it the other way, what are you hiding? [Laughs] I am an anxious person! I am clinically diagnosed as one. But people’s perception of me or my work doesn’t make me anxious. I think it’s because I have very imaginative parents. It feels as if I was conditioned to be a daydreamer and imagine things, and then that translated into a “Well, why not?” attitude. So I have confidence in myself. I do love the work that I make and I am also sure that it’s not for everyone, but I’m not thinking about that when I’m doing it.

If you’re not anxious about yourself or your work, then what are you anxious about? I’m a hypochondriac. But that’s very internal. It’s interesting because a lot of media seems like it’s coming from a very anxious place, or you’re very worried that someone out there may not like this movie, so you’re checking every box. Chill out. This insistence with creating product that pleases everyone — I’m sort of baffled.

How does your hypochondria show up? I am acutely aware of my body, and it’s almost like my brain is constantly scanning it up and down, and when it finds an anomaly that someone else would not even detect, I’m entertained by it until I get an answer.

Please don’t tell me you do a lot of online self-diagnosis. Oh, I used to. I’m better about it now.

The problem with searching medical stuff is that you always wind up at “It could be cancer.” It’s always cancer. I find having a mortal body to be such a humiliating burden and such a horrible thing to deal with. I would love it if I could not have a body. Oh, my God, if I could be a ghost and still do all the work that I do and just live my life? I don’t mind if I couldn’t touch anything! That would be heaven to me.

Since you’ve become more established, what has been interesting to you about the way people have interpreted you and your work? The New Yorker, for example, described you as having a “twink from space” look. [Laughs.] If I had an unlicensed Halloween costume of me that would be sold at Party City, that’s what it would be called. But what’s hidden in the weeds is that I am very interested in very normal ideas of fairness and goodness and showing different kinds of people. You don’t really realize that “Los Espookys” is a very queer show until you watch it and walk away, because there’s no rainbow flag in the poster, you know what I mean? At my core, there is a universality. But I let people do the scavenger hunt and find it.

A lot of your comedy pivots on characters having an epiphany. What’s one you’ve had lately? For a while I was fed this idea that my merely being visible as a queer person, as a foreign person, was in itself an act of good for the world. My epiphany was, it’s what I do with it. I’ve been thinking about how Hollywood needs to start putting their money where their mouth is in terms of being progressives and who gets paid what. You don’t know where the money goes unless you really ask. Money is such a dirty thing to talk about. People don’t like to talk about it. Can you imagine asking an actor, “How much did you get paid for this movie?”

I imagine it all the time. Is it true that you don’t use a credit card? No, I don’t have credit. Which makes it difficult to get an apartment, because even when you tell them, “Look, I’ll pay a year of rent up front,” you have people being like, “No.” But credit is such a nasty thing that I refuse to participate in it. I refuse to play nice with a system I don’t like. If that means I’ll never be a homeowner, then so be it.

What else do you refuse to do? I’m vegan. I don’t want to participate in nonvegan eating. Also, I don’t open mail.

You don’t open mail? I don’t open it. I have this phobia of mail. Have you ever gotten good news in the mail?

Occasionally. That’s why I don’t go to weddings, because I never find out when they happen. I also generally don’t like weddings. They feel performative. I don’t understand people who drag themselves to go to weddings, like, “Oh, I have to go to a wedding.” What do you mean, you have to go to a wedding?

When you talked about Hollywood needing to change how it does business, are there specific things beyond more transparency about where the money goes that you would like to see done differently? The honest answer is I don’t have an answer yet. But I feel it behooves me to learn more about the way things are made, the systems, the hierarchies, the business part of show business. Like I said, the epiphany is that whatever inspiration people like me get from seeing someone like me succeed is not enough. There is this thesis that representation is the be-all and end-all, when actually it’s sort of the bare minimum. It’s like, well, no [expletive], people should be consuming things about different kinds of people. It’s supposed to be that an underprivileged person is inspired by the journey of someone else like them, but then that starts falling into the trap of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.” Like, if only people were inspired to not be broke.

How much did you watch “Saturday Night Live” growing up in El Salvador? I only watched clips.

That’s interesting to me, because my sense is that for a lot of people who get on that show, “S.N.L.” was the North Star of their comedy career, the prize they always had their eyes on. It wasn’t like that for you? My goal is always to create work that I’m excited about. It’s never being affiliated with a thing that already exists. Which is why I was never a sports person. I’m not into succeeding in the game that somebody else came up with. It’s like, I scored a goal, OK, great. But you’re the one who designed that the ball was supposed to go into the net. I’m just a little peon succeeding at your thing. “Saturday Night Live” was a fantastic arena for me to explore, but it was never like, this is what I have to do with my life. Actually, I think that’s sort of an unhealthy way of entering it. Because then your goal becomes succeeding at the show and not having fun at being funny. If you’re too preoccupied with what the show means — it’s like you don’t want to go on a date already having a crush on the person. You want to see if you like them first. They have to prove themselves to you, too.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Lynda Barry about the value of childlike thinking, Father Mike Schmitz about religious belief and Jerrod Carmichael on comedy and honesty.