Balancing Imagination and Reality

Since the comedian Julio Torres came to America from El Salvador, more than a decade ago, his fantastical style has made him a singular presence in the entertainment landscape. An early stint writing for “Saturday Night Live” yielded some of the show’s weirdest and most memorable sketches; soon after that, Torres’s work on the HBO series “Los Espookys,” which he co-wrote and starred in, cemented his status as a beloved odd-child of the comedy scene. In his most recent work, he’s applied his dreamy sensibility to very real bureaucratic nightmares. “Problemista,” his first feature film, draws on Torres’s own Kafkaesque experience navigating the U.S. immigration system; in his new HBO show, “Fantasmas,” the protagonist considers whether to acquire a document called a “proof of existence,” without which everyday tasks like renting an apartment are rendered impossible. In a live taping at The New Yorker Festival, the hosts of Critics at Large talk with Torres about his creative influences, and about using abstraction to put our most impenetrable systems into tangible terms. “Life today is so riddled with these man-made labyrinths that are life-or-death … there’s something very lonely about it,” Torres says. “These flourishes are there in service of the humanity.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Problemista” (2023)
“Fantasmas” (2024-)
“Los Espookys” (2019-22)
“I Want to Be a Vase,” by Julio Torres
“My Favorite Shapes” (2019)
“Saturday Night Live” (1975-)
“Julio Torres’s ‘Fantasmas’ Finds Truth in Fantasy,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996)
“Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” (2003)
“The Substance” (2024)

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