You might think Mae Martin’s appearance on this week’s Edinburgh Comedy award shortlist crowns the emergence of an exciting new talent. Scratch the “new”: now 30, the Canadian has been doing this for more than 15 years. Her show Dope takes us back to the standup apprenticeship she served as a misfit adolescent in Toronto. The way she tells it, comedy was an entry drug to, er, drugs. Teenage Martin went on the stage, off the rails and into rehab. Half a lifetime on, she explores that period, and her own obsessive personality, in a likable and thoughtful set from a performer who’s made the overlap between personal revelation and social/anthropological commentary her own.
A remark from her mother triggers the soul search. Mae, says mum, always needs something to be obsessed with. Once upon a time, it was Bette Midler: Martin turns that gawky infatuation into five big-hitting minutes at the top of the show. Then, it was comedy: Martin first visited a standup club aged 11, and was soon stalking the resident sketch group and appearing (“Local Pre-Teen Obsessed with Comedy”) in the local news. The self-conscious tics have largely disappeared from mature Martin’s comedy, but self-mortification plays an effective role here, as she describes the monomaniacal nerd she used to be.
But it gets worse, when Martin is introduced to drugs – and is dealing within 48 hours. That’s how obsessive personalities work, she explains. The titular Dope doesn’t refer only to narcotics, but to the dopamine deficiency with which Martin has diagnosed herself. With reference to rat experiments and bullied monkeys, she speculates about her brain chemistry and the affinities between romantic relationships and recreational drugs.
It’s all kept frothy: Martin is no doom-and-gloom merchant, forever reassuring us that she’s fine now and wasn’t that bad at the time. The hair-raising narrative sometimes suggests otherwise, as teenage Mae checks into rehab, and (in a standout routine) grownup Mae panics when cocaine is offered at a party. This is all reported back in bright, chatty style, as if we’re being updated on Martin’s ongoing research project into her own idiosyncrasies. She’s got theories but few certainties; she’s interested to share and you feel she’d welcome feedback. And now she’s got some, in the form of an award nod and the consensus that she’s made her best show yet. Local Pre-Teen did not humiliate herself in vain.
- At Laughing Horse @ City Cafe, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, 18-30 September, and on a UK tour.
