Canadian comedian Mae Martin is perhaps best known for their starring role in the Netflix comedy Feel Good, where the central character is also a queer, nonbinary, ex-addict comedian named Mae. Perhaps uniquely, this show depicts Martin as somewhat awkward onstage, frequently unable to separate their professional life from their personal struggles. This narrative choice had already marked Martin as an innovator within the burgeoning genre of comedy shows featuring comics and their onstage personas. Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman et al; they took the opposite approach, depicting comedians as completely in control onstage but reckless and impulsive in their personal lives.

It’s fitting, then, that Martin’s new standup special SAP (directed by Abbi Jacobson, co-creator and star of Broad City and A League of Their Own) is a similarly risk-taking venture. SAP, as the name suggests, is about the sense of liberation offered by sappy, gooey things (“the Beatles are sap for me, sex is sap, it’s pretty great, friends are great, sex with friends is great”). When you’re emotionally healthy, you can embrace your inner sappiness—or laugh at it with people you care about. Throughout this show, Martin’s jokes (the smaller, self-contained stuff as well as more elaborate, recurring gags) are geared towards telling the audience something meaningful about empathy. No surprise, then, that Martin lays the foundations for this technique with a confessional core that also happens to quite funny.

 “I have a lot of feelings,” Martin says at one point. “It’s exhausting. I’m full to the absolute brim with feelings. I always visualise, like, Campbell’s cream of tomato soup. Just trying to keep my feelings contained, keep them from sloshing out of my orifices as I make my way through life. That’s how I feel about my feelings. All it takes is one person to go, ‘How are you?’ and they just shoot out of my ear and hit them in the face!”

This conundrum—how much of oneself do you put out there—manifests itself in hilarious ways during SAP. Like the time Martin cannot tell their father that describing how they were conceived is… definitely TMI (“the moonlight was glistening off your mother’s bottom”). Or when you’re in a rebound relationship but the other party hasn’t realised this fact yet. There is so much that is weird and wonderful here, like a family story whose veracity Martin sets out to ascertain scientifically—their parents claim to have driven under a gigantic moose this one time (turns out, a moose can be just big enough for this to be possible). 

In the show’s concluding 20 minutes or so, Martin turns their attention to the gender spectrum, transphobia and, inevitably, Dave Chappelle. But before responding to the comedian directly, Martin delivers quite a lovely sequence of jokes that educate the audience about queer and trans histories (“third and fourth genders are recognised, even venerated by many cultures around the world; I could have been revered but instead I’m standing around asking, ‘Which bathroom am I allowed to use, please?’”).

And, as Martin is quick to remind the audience, it’s not even like they particularly want to talk about gender. Arguing about things that affect you personally is a “lose-lose”. It’s just that trans rights are so tenuous right now and multi-millionaire comedians like Chappelle are making the problem far worse. Martin had top surgery not too long ago (“it’s not even like it’s making me super-happy, it’s just the absence of agony, really”) which puts them “on the trans spectrum of identity”. 

Martin’s jokes are geared towards telling the audience something meaningful about empathy.

I loved how Martin humorously explained the difference between biological sex and gender. They used the example of Beauty and the Beast—Gaston lies at one end of the spectrum (“he’s extreme masculinity, he’s hot!”) and Belle lies at another (“although she’s a good role model, because she can read books!”). And right in the middle is where Martin places themself; Lumiere or “the candlestick”. “The more freedom you give Lumiere, the more fun Belle and Gaston are going to have,” Martin says. “Lumiere is throwing parties all over the place, they’re like, ‘Be my guest!’”

That is an elegant, whimsical explanation for something that has launched a thousand Twitter feuds (and worse, obviously). But even funnier was Martin’s follow-up, where they imagine a campfire in the woods with some special guests.

“I have this fantasy,” Martin says. “It’s this really clear image in my head of Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., throw Joe Rogan in there… and they’re eating a hog roast. It’s this huge hog and they’re ripping the flesh off it. And then they turn the TV on and it’s me doing my little Beauty and the Beast gender routine and they go, ‘Oh my God, we were wrong’. And then I want them to cradle each other, just hold each other gently, and just gently rock. I want them to re-parent themselves, basically.”

The bit about “ripping the flesh off” the hog is such an indelible image and especially apt for describing this scene. Highly politicised issues that appeal to ultra-conservative American voters (trans rights are currently the number one example) are sometimes called ‘red meat issues’, after all (Urban Dictionary reckons the term was coined by Jon Stewart back in 2011). Part of Joe Rogan’s image is built around projecting the image of an old-school conservative American, who loves his guns and his barbecues. And because environmental activists have been urging Americans to eat less red meat, conservatives have doubled down on red meat as contrarian posturing.

The bit about Rogan et al ‘re-parenting’ themselves also shows us that Martin is attentive to the limitations of punitive discourse, which deals in public humiliation and ‘takedowns’ as currency (in a way, this is the best Chappelle ‘takedown’ because it isn’t really one, at least not in the popularly understood sense of the word). Yes, they want to make fun of these gentlemen. This is a comedy show after all. But they don’t want this gallery of rogues to be shunned or annihilated. They want them to get better, smarter, emotionally healthier. And when was the last time you witnessed an idea in this vein in a comedy show?

But then again, SAP disregards many conventions of the modern-day standup special, and it does so with such infectious charm and wit that you barely register the audacity. I can’t wait to see what Mae Martin does next, but I suspect it won’t involve well-trodden paths.