Mae Martin’s Workshop @ Cowgatehead

Mae Martin starts off immediately shedding her skin into her deadpan mother’s – who is thinking about changing her name to Winter. She reads us an email her mom sent that day, which spirals into several outrageous memories of her hippie-ish parents – naked childhood stories, drinking with her mom’s friends, her mom’s interactions with Mae’s middle school boyfriends.

She’s using this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival show as a chance to experiment with new material. Mixed in with the new jokes and stories, she reads prompts and questions collected from the audience in a bucket before getting on stage. The bucket is definitely a mixed bag, with examples including 'My gaybie baby daddy will save my womb from drying up, praise Jesus!' and 'pickles.' But most prompts turned into a pretty hilarious dissection of the motives behind the audience members’ questions, and random childhood memories to do with pickles. Every day you’ll get something a bit different, so there’s no telling what you might hear.

The show runs at an easy and smooth clip. With the benefit of the experimentation, we never dawdle too long, and we get to descend into some pretty hilariously obscure tangents as a result. The downside of that is at certain points when she seems to be going in an interesting direction, she moves along and changes the subject. The bucket would have been useful after already seeing the show. Mae delves into her family, but only briefly hints at funny observations about dating both men and women, before moving on to another topic. But it’s a free workshop, and having seen it, you can go back – perhaps with requests.

It’s the easy, unedited and conversational style that makes it seem so spontaneous and fresh. At one point her phone rings as she’s coming off an outrageous family story and switching gears, she looks at it, telling us it’s the girl she’s seeing. A beat later she cries out, “Why doesn’t she know I have a show right now, every day!” She appears to be making everything up on the spot, but in truth it’s more of a mixture of finished and new material. It just feels so easily spontaneous. She’s probing into new material with the audience, and even when things don’t quite work she has a certain confidence in her own awkwardness that makes it become funny. If you aren’t laughing at a joke, you’re soon laughing at why you aren’t laughing.