Mr. Torres, with Anna Drezen, also wrote a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” satire the next week that imagined the sparring partners of that 1962 drama as hamsters trapped in a glass box. One week later, he returned to highbrow animals in a digital short, released online, that imagined what a swan inside a motel painting would say if he could talk. Turns out, he would harass the duck nearby. “Have you inspired countless ballets?” said the swan, voiced by Dave Chappelle. “What was it called?” he asked, adding, “It wasn’t called Duck Lake.”

This rarefied comedy stands out on a laugh-hungry show that has long had a populist voice, leaning toward topical jokes, and broadly accessible references. But Mr. Torres’s approach is also not entirely successful, often more interesting than funny. Then again, he was just getting started. Much of his comedy on “Saturday Night Live” hinges on empathetic shifts in perspective, showing us the roiling inner life of an animal, an object (as in a hard-boiled sketch from the point of view of a sink having an existential crisis) or a person not known for introspection.

His first real triumph was another surprising immigrant story: “Melania’s Moments,” a series of digital shorts that detailed the thoughts of the future first lady in a concise form that resembles the mellow one-liners from the “S.N.L.” writer Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts.” Mr. Handey aimed for pure absurdity, but Mr. Torres makes Melania Trump a tragic, self-aware heroine trapped in her gilded cage.

Approaching a window in Trump Tower, like a cursed princess, she gazes onto Fifth Avenue, wondering about Sixth Avenue the way a Chekhov character dreams of Moscow. In another short, she wakes up in a cold sweat with the sense that her replacement is being born in rural Latvia, then decides to protect her.