Fans of the former Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres know him to be the current torchbearer of Izzardian absurdism. Whether on television (Los Espookys, Fantasmas), in cinema (Problemista) or in his children’s book about an aspirational toilet plunger (I Want to Be a Vase), his is a world where inanimate objects are sentient and diversity thrives in defiance of the corporate. In Color Theories, the charismatic Salvadoran American comic reveals another string to his bow: “I’m sent all over the world to find colours,” he confides, daring us to doubt him.
Like his previous show, My Favourite Shapes, this is an hour of sit-down comedy aided by an overhead camera which relays Torres’s theories – illustrated with crayon squiggles – on to a screen behind him. Sporting a copper-coloured pixie cut and a pair of pink feather antlers, Torres himself resembles a child’s doodle. His inquisitive mind produces interconnected ideas about Catholicism, the blandness of Pixar and what orange sounds like, while his insights train us to spot “highly purple behaviour”. His casual millennial delivery, peppered with “um”s and “ah”s, makes surreal concepts sound like items on a brunch menu.
Avoiding standard associations (such as green for envy) or obvious jibes (there is no mention of the US president’s orange hue), Torres uses colour to explain everything from tax avoidance to superhero vigilantism – his sage advice to Batman made that bit funnier by addressing him as “hun”. The anticapitalist, nonconformist philosophy that runs through all of Torres’s work is present, and deftly integrated. Weak material, such as underdeveloped observations on the animal kingdom, is in the minority.
Phrasing, as ever, is immaculate: Torres defines words as “the jobs that letters are hired to do”. Though he may have failed so far in his colour-scouting mission (he hasn’t yet found a new one, he admits), this hour leaves you tickled pink.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 16 August.
