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Mae Martin on Comedy, Canadian Audiences, and Coming Out on Stage
Mae Martin performs two shows Thursday night, part of Queer Pride 2011 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Photo courtesy of Doubletake Studios.
I’m Not Waving, I’m Drowning
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (12 Alexander Street)
Thursday June 23, 7 and 9 p.m., $15
Comedian Mae Martin has longstanding ties to both Second City and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre; tonight, as part of Buddies’ Queer Pride 2011 festival (a lead up to Pride Week), she’ll preview a one-woman show she’s taking to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.
“I started performing at 13, doing sketch, and eventually ‘graduated’ to stand-up, which I find more rewarding—and is certainly more self-sufficient,” she explains; she’s now been doing comedy for a full decade.
“At Second City, I started taking improv classes there, and hanging around obsessively with the comics, before getting hired to work the box office.” Her experiences at Buddies date back almost as far (she’ll perform at Homo Night in Canada for the seventh year in a row on July 2). “I’d be doing shows there, and they’d have to politely ask me to leave after the show, being underage, as the club nights started. It’s nice to be able to stick around afterward now; Buddies feels like home to me, as it does for a lot of gay comics, I’m sure.”
While Martin is upfront about being gay in her act, her act doesn’t revolve around it; in one recent set piece, she sings a song about her “man-crush” on actor Don Cheadle. “My comedy hinges more on my stressing about the state of the world, and my confusion about my place in it. Being gay just adds a bit more to the confusion of my life.” She came out on stage before doing so to her family: “I did a show called Jailbait, and in the show, I made out with a girl and tried to lose my virginity to a gay guy. I came out shortly after that. I never officially came out to my parents; I just started posting pictures of Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider on my walls. It was harder to come out to them as a comedian, actually—though they’re very supportive now.”
Martin performs as a finalist at the British Musical Comedy Awards. Photo by Alex Brenner.
Like many successful Toronto comics, Martin’s uprooted herself to pursue opportunities beyond Canadian borders, but rather than go to Los Angeles or New York, she went across the pond. “Well, I like food in pie form, and much prefer gloomy rainy weather to balmy Californian sun,” she jokes. Truthfully, she has a British passport, but there were other reasons she chose England to work on her career. “I have no ambition to be in a sitcom: I’m really into live comedy as a medium, and in the U.K., it’s an end to itself. There’s a lot of touring opportunities, and festivals, and there are comics there who sell out sports arenas, that we’ve never even heard of in North America. Also, the sensibility of comedy there is similar to what we do here in Canada, more so than in the States.”
So, we ask, how do British audiences respond differently than Canadian ones? “Canadian audiences don’t talk to comics much; they’re quietly appreciative. In England, they expect to be part of the show, and answer every rhetorical question. It’s not even heckling, they just want to be part of the conversation.”
Considering Martin’s longtime status as a openly gay performer, the furor over The Grid’s recent “Post-Mo” cover story comes up when we talk. “I thought it was a really short-sighted piece, because you can drive 20 minutes out of Toronto, or even go to certain intersections in the city, where you won’t be accepted. That said, I’ve been really lucky: I’ve had producers ask me to wear a dress, and you never know what jobs you aren’t getting because of being out, but I haven’t really experienced much discrimination.”
Has she found British audiences accepting? “At a literary festival in London recently, a really swanky affair called ‘Funny Women’, this posh guy in the crowd—in his 50’s, full linen suit, drinking lots of red wine—stands up when I introduce myself and says loudly, ‘You look like a bloke to me!’ There’s this awkward silence, and I reply, ‘I’m a girl.’ And he says, ‘Bravo!’ and starts a slow clap that everyone joins in on. So in his own way, he was being supportive.”