Mae Martin speaks onstage during Laugh Out Loud with Mae Martin and Friends hosted by Netflix at TUDUM Theater on March 28 in Hollywood. Sap, Mae Martin's first full-length Netflix special, is about looking for the positive in everyday life.Tommaso Boddi/AFP/Getty Images
Mae Martin is a proponent of sap. As in the sticky metaphor for the small, good things that make life worth living – the sources of joy that arise from the everyday and offer a reprieve from the global misery marathon. So naturally their first full-length Netflix special – called, you guessed it, Sap – is the exact type of positive touchstone they’re talking about.
Positivity “is an ongoing process,” Martin tells me during a Zoom interview. “A daily process, that’s where the show came out of: coming out of the pandemic and this huge wall of badness that we’re constantly being inundated with. All we can do is try to see the positive and try to make good change where we can, because what’s the alternative? There’s no alternative unless we resign ourselves to profound pessimism.”
“We’ve gotta find ways to find the sap.”
Martin, a Canadian comic who’s been performing stand-up since their early teens, has had an exciting few years. While based in Britain, they wrote and starred in Feel Good, a semi-autobiographical series that seemed to garner acclaim from everyone who watched it. It was noted not just for Martin’s stunning performance, but also for how the show offers a heartfelt and funny exploration of love, sexuality, recovery and the discovery of self. It was also another avenue, outside of stand-up, for Martin to perform under the banner of vulnerability.
“I find that there’s a great power in it,” they say, referring to their openness to being vulnerable. “I don’t really know how to be anything but. I have to find a way to take control of it and to say things in the exact way I want to say them, and that’s partly the balance between social media and my personal life. With comedy, I have all the time in the world to sit and think about what I want to say and how I want to say it, and you don’t have that same control in life often, so I try to be careful.”
The line between their social and private self is one Martin walks brilliantly over the course of Sap. The special, directed by Abbi Jacobson, opens with the comic tossing their phone into a campfire (something we’d all love to do), yet still offers a fresh approach to the cult of modernity: Instead of chastising, Martin reminds viewers that we’re the ones helming this strange reality together.
Martin's capacity for critical thinking elevates their work from funny and entertaining to interesting and thought-provoking in their new Netflix special Sap.Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images
“It’s definitely a tricky thing to try and skewer, technology and social media,” they say. “It’s been done, and the crazy thing is that we’re all aware that it’s rotting our minds and our attention spans and our sense of connection to each other, and we’re powerless against it. And you don’t want to sound like an old curmudgeon because there’s also great, positive things that come out of the internet as well.”
Martin maintains that more than one thing can be true: “Things can be tragic and funny. And that’s an energy in the show, too – the absurdity of the world we’re living in, the systems we’re participating in. You have to turn off so much of your critical thinking just to exist in this world.”
Yet it’s Martin’s capacity for critical thinking that elevates their work from funny and entertaining to interesting and thought-provoking. For the bulk of Sap, they treat the audience as you would a new friend: bonding over shared neuroses, tackling our collective habit of wanting to show off who we are and what we like, and imagining the sound a car might make if driving under a moose (you’ll understand it when you get there). But starting at 52 minutes in, the comic, who is non-binary, uses part of their special to engage in conversations about gender and sexuality.
I ask Martin whether they felt obligated to talk about gender, particularly since they make clear in Sap that in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be something we need to talk about at all.
“It’s a combination, I think,” they answer, describing their approach to the topic. “I’m glad I put it near the end of the show because all it takes to understand trans issues or identity is knowing one trans person. So if I can be that trans person for some people and they can feel like they get to know me and they like me, or they can see that I’m not a threat in any way, then hopefully that will garner some empathy or some good will.”
“I feel like it’s still important, that visibility, but also, my gender and my sexuality is no more a part of me than a straight person’s sexuality is of them,” Martin explains. “It’s not the dominant part of my life or personality. In a perfect world I wouldn’t have to talk about it at all, but we’re in a pretty scary time for trans rights. So it feels important.”
They add: “The great thing would be if more high-profile straight allies would talk about it, because as soon as I start talking about it, it’s easy to [dismiss].”
But neither Martin nor Sap is easily dismissible. Instead, Martin uses their latest platform to create a place in which anyone visiting can simply exist and enjoy, knowing we’re all connected through the messiness of the human experience.
Before our interview wraps, Martin obliges my request to share their own sources of sap, to aid in my attempt to find some of my own.
“I’ve been loving making music and playing guitar!” they exclaim. “It’s been my childhood dream to make music with my friends.” A pause. “And Survivor Season 44 is currently airing, so that’s sap for me. Jeff Probst’s face is sap for me. And I bought a foosball table!”
Admittedly, Jeff Probst’s face is very calming. Evidently, we’re both saps for legacy TV.