Hot Mic is a weekly column by Leah Abrams documenting, spotlighting, and reviewing live comedy in NYC. To borrow a construction from Julio Torres, on the evening of March 6, I was feeling very lilac—the dainty color you see right before you pass out or at the tail end of a light bruise. Lilac, the color of Hannah Horvath saying “I’m feeling just a little bit frail…” Not purple, the color that Torres praises as drama, the color of stepmothers, and a color that occurs “when red mocks navy blue.” I was feeling more down, more muted, exhausted by some dumb work stuff, and hungry because I missed lunch. You know, lilac. That Wednesday night Torres was at The Bell House in Brooklyn for his show, Problemista Tour: Julio and Friends. It was pouring rain outside; I had no umbrella; I was running late. By the time I stomped in with soaking wet hair, the show had already started. I grabbed an IPA to down on an empty stomach and shuffled into the completely sold out, standing-room-only crowd, a testament to the cult following Torres has built over years of writing and performing in Brooklyn. I would have given up on this trek halfway through the train ride had I not been a member of said cult myself. For Torres, I decided, I could be brave. “I used to play a game with my Barbie dolls,” he said at one point during the show. “I would dress them in tattered white dresses and drag them along through the dirt. The game was called: ‘We don’t know what happened.’” Torres is at the center of a movement of surrealist comedians who set their sights on the fantastical and absurd. Blessed with some kind of magical spatial synesthesia, he creates believable storylines for the mundane colors, shapes, and objects that make up our every day, finding narrative momentum in the aesthetic. It’s very weird but there’s a grain of truth behind every observation. After hearing him declare that “navy blue is the color of law and order,” you'll probably find yourself thinking: “It’s true, navy blue really is the color of law and order.” Torres' Problemista Tour is to help promote his new A24 movie, Problemista, a comedy following an aspiring toy designer on his quest to get a work visa to remain in New York City. The “and friends” of Julio and Friends were members of the film’s star-studded cast: Spike Einbinder, River Ramirez, and Larry Owens, all members of this friend group of artists who, yes, put their stuff on social media but really thrive live on stage. I’ve seen them all perform before in various combinations but each time is a singular delight; you don’t know what will happen next. “I live on the 14th floor of a 13-floor walk-up,” Einbeinder said in the first set, perfectly timed to the saxophone swells of the Taxi Driver soundtrack, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He does an inversion of classic comedy archetypes, old-timey Borscht-Belt stuff with a queer, magical-realist twist, like if Milton Berle did drag. “Man, this city has changed,” he said, “since I moved here in 2022.” Most comedians these days are allergic to earnestness, choosing to wrap their material in so many layers of irony that it’s almost impossible to parse. But Einbeinder, Torres, and their peers disregard this trend—and rightly so. It's much funnier to be earnestly weird than to be too cool to share anything at all. The next performer, Ramirez, another Problemista cast member who's also collaborated with Torres on Los Espookys, proved how much…
