‘My Favorite Shapes By Julio Torres’ Hints At The Shape Of Things To Come For One Of Comedy’s Most Unique Talents

Julio Torres is every precocious child left alone in his/her room to play with his/her toys, except Torres never lost his flair for imagination (or, for that matter, anything else).

It’s that creativity that allowed Torres to animate and give voice to a sink on Saturday Night Live. If you loved that, then you’ll adore his first hourlong stand-up comedy special for HBO, My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres.

HBO prepped its audience for Torres by releasing Los Espookys first. That’s the bilingual comedy co-created, co-written and co-starring Torres alongside Fred Armisen and Ana Fabrega as a group of Central American horror fans looking to turn their fandom into a show-business career.

In real life, Torres immigrated from El Salvador after attending college in New York City, hoping show-business would find a spot for his comedy niche. It did. Lorne Michaels did. HBO has. For this elaborate-show-and-tell performance, Torres has items presented for his playtime via conveyor belt, on a set designed by his mother, Tita de Torres, and sister, Marta Torres.

Some of the shapes are just that: A square, a rectangle, an oval. Others are items that contain shapes. Still more are collections of oddities that, when combined, become a symbolic interpretation of Torres, or of a celebrity’s home, or of a celebrity herself.

“My least favorite shape is someone telling me it is what it is,” he says.

Three times during the show, director Dave McCary (who works with Torres on SNL) cuts away to inner monologues for the objects, all of them voiced by former SNL guest hosts. They could’ve easily been pitched as short films for SNL, but Torres told Decider they were developed specifically for his special.

For all of his eccentricities, Torres also has plenty of material that’s accessible to pretty much anyone.

He builds jokes off of watching The Flintstones, and later House Hunters, and uses a classic joke structure to wonder why the prince in Cinderella focused so much on the glass slipper. One of his favorite shapes required no imagination at all, as it’s an action figure from a fast-food meal he enjoyed as a child in the 1990s.

Including that toy from a Disney tie-in to The Hunchback of Notre Dame reminds us all that we were kids once, playing with our favorite shapes.

Have we lost our sense of wonder?

In two separate bits, Torres teases that he, too, had lost some of his innocence, with curtains or a door leading nowhere symbolizing the absence of God and an atheist aesthetic. But then again, Torres also jokes about believing in reincarnation, because only he could have seen the giant wooden Trojan Horse and decided to let it and the Greeks into Troy’s gates.

But don’t worry: None of the shiny objects Torres wants to show you will defeat your spirit or your country.

“As I was preparing this show, and deciding which shapes were going to go in which order, and I was weighing out the pros and cons of all of them, thinking, which ones of them were stars, which ones were more supporting. And as I was deciding on all of that, I thought ‘Oh, I’m sorry, is this one of the many good jobs that I’m stealing from hard-working Americans?’ Look, I’m just doing it because no one else was doing it, and it needed to be done!”

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Julio Torres: My Favorite Shapes on HBO GO or HBO NOW