Inside the remarkable comedy of Julio Torres

This month, “Problemista” hit movie theaters. Maybe you have heard of it; maybe you have not. It is the story of Alejandro, a Salvadoran immigrant to the United States who dreams of being a toy designer for Hasbro. If only the pesky U.S. immigration system and the travails of New York City were not constantly getting in his way. 

The success of “Problemista” is inconsequential. Okay, yes, its star and creator, Julio Torres, deserves a smash hit. But only so that he can keep putting his singular comedic vision out into the world. As Torres told The Cut about “Problemista,” “I hope people like it, but I don’t make work with [other people’s] perception in mind.” 

Who is Julio Torres?

Torres was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1987. Tita, his mother, is a fashion designer and architect who had her own store. While he was young in El Salvador, Torres said to The Atlantic that he “would sketch big horrible princess dresses for her to make and sell.” 

He moved to New York City to attend The New School, where he received a degree in literary studies. But, Torres said to GQ, “school was just the excuse to figure out how to be here and remain here … I wanted to write for TV, and I wanted to write for film.” He was unsure how to meet that goal, so he started doing stand-up in New York. 

What is some of Torres’ best work? 

Torres’ comedic voice began being heard by a wider public when he became a writer for SNL. Some of his best-known skits include “Papyrus,” about a man who simply cannot accept the way the movie “Avatar” uses the wavy font Papyrus, and “Wells for Boys,” in which Fisher-Price debuts a life-size well for sensitive boys to ponder over. 

Then Torres’ soft, observant, melancholic humor put his own self at the center in 2019 with an high-touch HBO adaptation of his stand-up show, “My Favorite Shapes.” In it, a conveyor belt rolls a collection of objects in front of Torres as he tells hilarious, absurd, poignant stories about each. “He likes to speak of objects not as mere objects, but as beings with identities, with souls of their own,” said The Atlantic. “Everything has had a life, however small — and the backstories he offers in the special tend to be as human, vulnerable, and complex as they are funny,” 

Around the same time “My Favorite Shapes” debuted, Torres was co-writing and co-starring in “Los Espookys,” a Spanish-language comedy about a gaggle of horror-obsessed friends who start a for-hire horror business. Pals getting paid to scare people, essentially. It debuted in 2019, was renewed for a second season after the pandemic, in 2022, then was canceled. About the second season, AV Club said, “what worked last time — the comic chemistry between the main quartet, the cool synthy original music and choice soundtrack picks, the color scheme and dramatic lighting, the camp and absurdity, the aesthetic and wit — works again this time, only with maybe a bit more punch and sharpness.” Nothing else like it has ever been on TV. 

What is ‘Problemista’? 

The first feature film directed by Torres also stars Torres as Alejandro, the protagonist, and Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth, an art critic who is trying to preserve the artistic legacy of her cryogenically frozen husband. Alejandro wants to be a toy designer, but he needs to obtain a green card to work at Hasbro. Elizabeth promises to sponsor his green card if he helps her line up an exhibition of her husband’s work. 

The storytelling is a mix of the mundane (an immigrant’s uphill battle to secure residency) with the ingenious (the U.S. immigration system is depicted as a kind of head-spinning maze). Torres thinks it is crucial for art, like “Problemista,” to dissect the workaday. “Like, where’s the insurance company movie?” he said to The Hollywood Reporter. “Even though those hurdles in life are not as dramatically accessible as falling in love or robbing a bank, they are more common, and they stay with you and scar you and traumatize you and make you grow.”

Torres’ comedic prowess comes from his ability to face reality with a tender groan and a wink. When Alejandro starts looking for new work opportunities, he turns to Craigslist — as one would. In “Problemista,” Craigslist is portrayed by a person (Larry Owens) and is a gig-economy genie existing in a kind of trash-heap wonderland. It is a depiction emblematic of Torres’ worldview. As Torres said to Polygon, “children are very curious. Children ask a lot of questions … And then somewhere along the line, we’re told that asking a lot of questions is bad, or that being too curious is not a good thing.” Torres, with his shrewd, whimsical storytelling, catechizes the things we have forgotten to ask.