MY FAVORITE SHAPES BY JULIO TORRES (Dave McCary). Premieres Saturday (August 10) on HBO Canada and streams on Crave. Rating: NNNN
In My Favorite Shapes, Julio Torres describes himself as “a little alien playing with my toys” and “an alien of exceptional ability.” The latter term, of course, refers to the U.S. immigration classification for foreigners granted permanent residency status because of rarified skills or extraordinary achievements.
The El Salvador-born comedian takes the “alien” theme and leans in, infusing into his hour-long comedy special in ways that sharply comment on the limits of political imagination and of stand-up itself. He turns the comedy special into something totally original.
Best known for penning memorable Saturday Night Live sketches such as Wells For Boys, Papyrus and The Actress, Torres uses humorous design critiques of household objects, toys and fonts (Papyrus famously shamed James Cameron into redesigning the Avatar logo) to point out ways dominant culture discourages creativity and categorizes people.
As he told GQ last year, he’s “slowly learning that, to many people, my presence is inherently political even if I don’t do anything. Even if I’m talking about a vase, the work inherently has an agenda because of who I am and the labels people attach to me.”
My Favorite Shapes plugs into that tension. In Torres’s world, objects have inner lives, deliver existential monologues and their concerns suggest metaphors that he occasionally spells out. While Torres has earned a rep for making fun of Donald Trump, the butt of his jokes aren’t necessarily just the right. Whether the subject is religion, weddings, open relationships, design or decor, he walks the talk: this is a wholly imaginative response to the widespread and generation-spanning inability of people across the political spectrum to imagine a world beyond the status quo.
It begins with a platinum-blonde Torres dressed in a silver robe and matching pants standing in a blank space talking on the phone to his mother. If he doesn’t show the audience his shapes, “I don’t know that anyone else would.” The geometric CGI ground he’s standing on begins moving and morphs into a sci-fi 80s deco set in a Brooklyn club, where the special was taped before a live audience. He takes a seat in front of a conveyor belt that whirrs to life and gets right to it: “I have a lot of shapes and not a lot of time.”
Sitting during a “stand-up” set is hardly new. Both Dave Chappelle and Aziz Ansari have sat on stools in recent Netflix specials to suggest a kind of affable seriousness, but the rigid formality of Torres’s set-up flips that idea completely, underscoring the theme running through his humour: invent the world you want to live in rather than abide by parameters that are forced on you.
From the special’s opening minutes, it quickly becomes apparent that “shapes” is loosely defined. He breezes through the first few items on the conveyor: a square, a rectangle and an oval. The square inspires an ironic riff on the copyright lawyer that had to clear all the shapes for air. The oval suggests a tension between shapes that are perfectly symmetrical and those that aren’t. The rectangle is simply having a bad day.
In one of three digressions written with literary flourish and that feature a guest voice-over, we meet a tiny cactus haunted by the previous inhabitant of its glass dish (“I feel as if I’ve walked into my life halfway through”).
Various objects embody Torres’s obsession with “the colour clear,” including Cinderella’s glass slipper. Some of the shapes lead to jokes that riff on the underlying conservatism in cartoons like The Flintstones and Disney’s The Hunchback Of Notre Dame or, as he puts it, “the negative space around the shapes.”
The bits gradually grow more involved, the shapes more elaborate. Some earlier ones that may not have seemed as instantly funny gradually contribute to the overarching themes. He isn’t just concerned with easy laughs, but with creating a world full of delightful, visceral and personal details.
Torres’s delivery is deadpan but never disengaged. Everything feels precise and intentional, from the way his glitter-covered hands show off objects to a camera capturing close-ups projected on a screen to the live audience above (the special was directed by his SNL collaborator Dave McCary), to the arch intonation that fills his storytelling and impressions. One of the biggest laughs comes from the painfully accurate facial expression he uses to set up a joke about watching the reality series House Hunters International.
His eye for detail is evident in each of the objects. Some are original designs, like a series of proposed zoo animals, and others are familiar, like a Brita filter that’s right at home in his spacey translucent world. Some are mini versions of large objects, like that “nasty little curtain” that separates first class from coach on an airplane – one of the show’s most explicitly political bits. When he shows off a bejeweled purse hanger that he’s named Jessica, design critique, social commentary and comedy brilliantly merge.
Each shape has a backstory, often melancholy. The SNL commercial Wells For Boys plugged into the longing of queer children pressured into conforming to gender norms. An equally heartbreaking story about a trip to Disney World mines the same territory. Embedded in the work is a sly critique of how the entertainment conglomerate assumes secondary female cartoon characters will be of little interest to visitors – much less little boys.
“My happiest moments were me by myself in my room playing,” he explains, adding that his parents encouraged him to believe anything was possible. His stories give us snippets of biography, moments from his life where he ventured out into the world and was told – directly or indirectly – to scale back expectations.
But by not ceding to the pressure to take a boring corporate job, he has found success. Then again, as an immigrant he is told he has to be exceptional in order to be accepted.
As he puts it, “My least favourite shape is someone telling me it is what it is.”
