Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

There’s off-the-wall, and then there’s Julio Torres. A comedian like no other, he spends this hour doodling in a notebook, his calm scribbles projected onto the screen behind him, as he soberly advances his peculiar theory that explains the world entirely through colour-based analogy. 

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, for example, is orange because he’s halfway between a beachball and a gun, obviously. Ellen DeGeneres wants the world to see her as yellow, but we all know that really she’s red. 

Torres – formerly a writer on Saturday Night Live –  takes this very seriously, announcing in his preamble that the show is ‘technically’ part of the comedy festival as if it were a booking error. 

By way of warm-up he talks about the personalities and emotional needs of letters rather than what function they are ‘hired to perform’. That this quirkiness is the ‘accessible’ icebreaker gives an early indication of the scale of pleasing absurdity, delivered with utter conviction, we are about to witness.

His main thesis first comes across as merely silly, though we get the gist of what he’s getting at. Yet over the hour these ideas blossom into a convincing full-blown philosophy that’s got surprisingly political and deep aspects. Colours become symbols of the competing emotions of joy, anger and logic within us all. 

Along the way, we get detours into how piñatas vary across the nations of South America, the Real Housewives TV franchise, supermarket loyalty cards, food delivery apps and how anxiety has been weaponised by companies and politicians. 

Yet this is observational stand-up like nothing else, each ‘have you ever noticed…’ becoming a gateway to seeing the world in a whole new way, like a mini-enlightenment. In his hands, updating an iPhone becomes an epic, magical quest and it makes perfect sense for him to describe it thus.

The El Salvadorian is an unlikely philosopher king, entirely unassuming with a very hesitant delivery that sometimes, and a little frustratingly, contains more ‘erms’ than actual words. He can seem to meander, too, though that’s merely misdirection as every tangent leads to a fresh, perfectly considered, truth.

We lean in for  each nugget of gnomic wisdom he imparts – always brilliantly and eccentrically insightful – with the disruption to our way of seeing the world inherently funny. When it comes to showing things in their true colours, Torres makes the metaphor real.

Review date: 21 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival