Fast Facts

• Born: May 2, 1987, Toronto, Ontario.
• Began stand-up: Toronto, age 13 (1999–2000).
• Moved to the UK: 2011.
• Best known for: Feel Good (Channel 4 / Netflix, 2020–2021); SAP (Netflix, 2023); co-authored book Can Everyone Please Calm Down? Making Sense of LGBTQ+ (2019).
• Frequent collaborators: Joe Hampson (Feel Good co-creator), Marc Maron (podcast and tour appearances), writer-performer Joel Dommett (early UK tours).
• Pronouns: they/them since 2021.

The Toronto Early Years

Martin started stand-up in Toronto at age 13, in 1999–2000, which is genuinely unusual — most working stand-ups start in their early twenties. The Toronto alt comedy scene of the early 2000s was small, centered on rooms like the Rivoli and Comedy Bar, and friendly to younger performers in a way that larger-city scenes tend not to be. Martin performed there consistently through their teens and worked with a steady set of Toronto mentors (including, in published accounts, some overlap with the Kids in the Hall alumni circuit, who maintained active Toronto connections well past the 1990s).

Martin also, publicly, struggled significantly with substance use during their late teens and early twenties. Martin has been open about this period in subsequent stand-up material and in the autobiographical frame of Feel Good. The substance-use history is consequential for the work: it is the primary text of Feel Good and an underlying subject of substantial SAP material.

The UK Move (2011) and the Fringe Circuit

Martin moved to London in 2011 and spent the following decade building a career primarily on the UK comedy circuit — the Edinburgh Fringe, the BBC radio-comedy apparatus, the UK comedy-club touring grid. The choice is historically consequential. British stand-up, unlike American stand-up, rewards hour-long structured shows built around coherent thematic material rather than interchangeable sets of bits (see our British Alt Comedy page for why). Martin's work developed inside this framework, which is why subsequent Netflix-era work feels unusually well-constructed by American standards.

Across the 2010s, Martin performed annual Edinburgh Fringe runs, each one a standalone themed hour:

• Us (2014)
• Best Newcomer nomination for Us.
• Me and Joe (with Joe Hampson, 2015)
• Dope (2017) — the show that became the thematic foundation of Feel Good. Directly autobiographical about addiction and recovery. Moved off-West-End after the Fringe run.
• Mae Martin's Guide to 21st Century Sexuality (BBC Radio 4, 2016–2019) — the radio project that introduced Martin to a national UK audience.

By 2019, Martin had a significant UK profile, a published book (Can Everyone Please Calm Down?), and the Dope material ready to adapt into television. Channel 4 and Netflix co-commissioned Feel Good on the basis of that material.

Feel Good (Channel 4 / Netflix, 2020–2021)

Feel Good ran two seasons, twelve episodes. Martin co-created with Joe Hampson, starred as a fictionalized version of themselves (the character is also called Mae), and wrote or co-wrote all twelve episodes. Lisa Kudrow played Martin's mother in a recurring supporting role.

The show is, on the surface, a romantic comedy about Mae's relationship with George (played by Charlotte Ritchie), a woman Mae has convinced to come out as gay. Underneath the romantic-comedy frame, the show is substantially about Mae's addiction recovery and the relapses and interpersonal damage the recovery produces. The show's formal innovation is that it refuses to resolve either frame: the romantic comedy is genuinely romantic-comedy, and the addiction material is genuinely serious, and the show does not let either mode override the other.

Feel Good was critically well-received across both seasons and won Martin consideration for British and international comedy awards. It was also, practically, the project that established Martin's cross-Atlantic profile. Netflix's distribution made the show available to US audiences who had not previously been exposed to Martin's Fringe or radio work.

SAP (Netflix, 2023)

Martin's first proper Netflix stand-up special. Directed by Abbi Jacobson (of Broad City, which is itself a useful contextual note about how the stand-up special has become cross-generational-collaborative in ways the 2010s specials mostly were not). Taped at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles across two nights in autumn 2022.

The material is structured around three rough subject areas:

• Gender identity — Martin's material on being nonbinary is notable for what it does not do. It does not make the gender material itself the joke. It does not perform gender-material-as-brave-disclosure. It treats the subject as one axis of Martin's life among several and builds jokes inside that register. The resulting material lands differently from comparable material by other performers because the construction is comedic-craft-first rather than disclosure-first.
• Stories about animals — a running theme across the hour. The material on a childhood obsession with Bert (the Sesame Street character) and on interactions with a moose is among the special's strongest.
• The structural bit on the audience's expectations — the special's final ten minutes are built around Martin announcing a closing bit about their pronouns, then doing a deliberately-different kind of bit instead. The technique is structural, and it demonstrates that Martin is aware of the autobiographical-confessional register that Rothaniel and Nanette established and is, in SAP, deliberately sidestepping it.

SAP's critical reception in 2023–24 was substantially better than its first-week streaming metrics indicated. The special is the clearest single document of what structured, well-written alt-mainstream stand-up can look like in the 2020s when it does not default to the confessional register.

Our Best Alt Comedy Specials 2025–2026 page ranks SAP as the best conventional stand-up hour of the period covered.

The 2024–2026 Work

Since SAP, Martin has toured continuously. The 2024 and 2025 tours have developed post-SAP material that has not yet been released on a streaming platform. The material expands the SAP register — more about aging, more about partnership, more about being a Canadian-British comedian in the US — and is reportedly being filmed for a 2026 release. The specific release platform is, as of April 2026, not public.

Other 2024–26 work:

• Writing and acting in Wayward — a 2025 Netflix limited series Martin co-created about a reform school for troubled girls. Mixed reviews; worth seeing partly because it is Martin's first serious attempt at a non-comedic television project.
• Occasional stand-up appearances at Largo and other LA alt venues throughout 2024–25.
• Podcast guest appearances including WTF with Marc Maron (2024) and Scott Aukerman's Comedy Bang! Bang! (multiple appearances across 2024–25).

Why Martin Matters

Three propositions for Martin's importance to the contemporary alt scene.

First, the British-craft-imported-to-American-streaming argument. Martin's work is structurally British in a way that Netflix-era American stand-up rarely is. The Edinburgh Fringe's hour-long thematic-discipline requirement produced, across Martin's 2010s, a writer-performer whose jokes function in ways most contemporary American alt stand-ups do not attempt. Netflix's distribution brought that work to audiences that otherwise would not have encountered it.

Second, the alternative-to-the-confessional argument. The post-Nanette, post-Rothaniel American alt scene has strongly privileged the autobiographical-confessional register. Martin's work is a visible demonstration that the older structured-stand-up register still has artistic possibilities when the craft is disciplined enough. The clearest public argument for "jokes still matter" in the 2020s American alt scene.

Third, the gender-material-as-context argument. Martin's work on gender identity is the clearest contemporary demonstration of the queer-representation technique Scott Thompson developed in the Kids in the Hall decades earlier: treating the performer's queerness as context for the material rather than as the material itself. In a cultural moment in which a lot of gender-material comedy is structured as disclosure, Martin's refusal to make the disclosure load-bearing is itself a specific craft choice worth studying.

Where to Start

• Canonical entry: SAP (Netflix, 2023). If you are new to Martin, start here.
• For the TV work: Feel Good season one, then season two. Both seasons are short and worth completing.
• For the Fringe-era stand-up: Dope (2017 Fringe show) is available in various recorded formats and remains the clearest pre-Netflix document of the stand-up voice.
• For the prose work: Can Everyone Please Calm Down? Making Sense of LGBTQ+ (2019) is a useful secondary text.