Mae Martin walks towards the microphone stand clutching her acoustic guitar. The slight performer musses up her blonde crop and laughs nervously before launching into her routine.
“Sometimes I wish I had more of a purpose… I wish someone would just tell me, ‘Go and avenge the death of your father.’ Or, ‘Go and find the Ark of the Covenant.’ Just a simple task that I could devote all of my energy to.”
After detailing her discomfort with the vagueness of life’s purpose and her constant fear of the approaching apocalypse, she breaks into a song about how she copes with it all: hot showers and Alanis Morissette.
Mae Martin, 23, is a comic to watch in Toronto's stand-up scene.
Not that you could tell from the bit, but Martin is a lesbian—just one of many working Toronto’s stand-up circuit. Toronto seems a swell place for queer comics of all stripes. By many accounts, the comedy scene is exceedingly supportive and sexual identity doesn’t limit the breadth of material up for grabs.
Comedy hasn’t always looked this way for queer comics, though. Maggie Cassella, a comedian and the producer of ‘We’re Funny That Way,’ a yearly comedy showcase and gala by queer performers, remembers a time when gay comedians played to their relative rarity for easy laughs.
“You used to be able to stand up and say the word ‘gay’ and that’s that,” she explained.
The result was stilted comedy that played to stereotypes or rolled out queer experiences as strange and side-splitting.
Cassella said audiences grew tired of those ploys. She believes we could all do without ever hearing another coming-out story stand in for real comedy, that is “unless Golda Meir was there.”
Today, there are more openly gay comedians on stage than ever before, and it seems that dated brand of comedy no longer passes muster. In fact, rather than speak of gay comedy, Cassella refers to a “queer sensibility” in comedy – an intangible quality related more to a transgressive mode of delivery and content than to the sex life of the person delivering the punch lines.
So open-ended is the concept of gay comedy today that even straight-identified comics like Deborah Etta Robinson get tagged as queer.
Robinson often performs at all-female events and puts on shows with lesbian comics, including Martin.
“I’m an honourary lesbian, I guess,” Robinson said.
Robinson’s brand of comedy runs parallel to that of Amy Sedaris or Sarah Silverman in that she relishes shocking audiences by juxtaposing crass and unexpected jokes against her nerdy appearance. In one of her skits, “A Divine Intervention,” Robinson is a lost Christian who finds her way back to church after receiving a sign from God: Jesus’s face in a soiled square of toilet paper.
According to Andrew Clark, director of the comedy writing and performance program at Humber College, the comedy industry has long been accepting of LGBTQ performers. He chalks this up to the very nature of comedy.
“On a certain level, comedy is all about breaking taboos, being transgressive, questioning sexuality, gender and all sorts of stuff,” he said. And as far as Clark’s concerned, the “queer sensibility” differs from comic to comic.
“People are dealing with their sexuality in ways that are unique to their own experience,” he said.
For Martin, this means waxing nostalgic about early lesbian proclivities after a song about showering through the End of Days.
“I wrote a song about why I think I’m gay—aside from eating a peach in Grade 7. It’s about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Played to the tune of “Zombies” by The Cranberries, Martin’s song re-imagines an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her version stars leather boots, boobs, and girl-on-Buffy action. Martin plays it at most of her shows and it always kills.
And how does she follow this outing gut-buster? With a tune about her expansive love of Don Cheadle, of course.