This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Julio Torres is one of the most original minds working in comedy right now.

He first made his name as a writer on Saturday

Night Live, and then he went on to make two shows for HBO that remain cult favorites, Los

Spookies and Fantasmas. Torres also wrote and directed the film Problemista about a toy designer

who's facing deportation.

There's a really unique surrealism to his humor,

and when staff writer Michael Schulman profiled Julio Torres for the New Yorker,

the piece ran under the headline, Extraordinary Alien.

You know, of all the people that I've profiled for the magazine, Julio's one of those people

where I just don't think his mind works quite like anyone else's.

His comedy is not a straightforward setup, joke, set up, joke.

It's more like he's a guest lecturer at an art school or something, and he's laying out

his very particular way of seeing the world. He's very

design and visual-oriented. He's very in tune with the inner life of objects. His new HBO special,

which comes out this month, is called color theories. And the way he sees colors is quite different from

the way that you and I see colors.

We met in the East Village of Manhattan on one of the first warm, sunny days of the year,

and we sat in the park.

So I want to, without giving too much away about color theories,

maybe give people a little bit

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