Mae Martin is an addict. At the age of six, she was addicted to Bette Midler. It was a curious, grand, important feeling and one she knew she must indulge alone, in her room after dinner. At 11, after she was invited up on stage to pretend to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, and there felt the full force of an audience’s laughter, Martin became addicted to standup comedy, leaving school three years later to perform full-time. She would walk onstage at 14 with a cigarette to complicated silences, and spend her evenings with adults, and their alcohol, and their cocaine. At 16 she was addicted to drugs and her parents kicked her out. Now 32, having been through rehab and moved from Toronto to London, she has used her 10,000-plus hours of standup to carve out a unique place in British comedy where she talks about all of these things; a place that is warm and clean and wise, and very funny.

Shrugging off her jacket on a winterish afternoon last month, Martin was cautious but charming. White-haired, wide-eyed, she appeared freshly hatched. She’d just come from having a new suit fitted – the answer, hopefully, to her long-standing anxieties over how to dress in order to feel like herself. Except, the tailor kept referencing Ellen DeGeneres when she had been quite clear that he was to cut the suit with Leonardo DiCaprio in mind, and only Leonardo DiCaprio. I could clearly picture the conversation: her polite insistence that he accept who she told him she was, rather than impose his own ideas.

This will not be her first suit. As a child, she wore a three-piece suit and bow tie, and it was in this divine little outfit that her parents first took her to see the standup shows that would change her life. “Watching comedy for the first time I felt absolutely on fire. I just couldn’t believe there was this environment where people were being applauded for the weirdest things about themselves,” she says, opening her eyes even wider. “Especially feeling like an outsider at school, and then finding this community where I could own those things and be applauded for them. People who would laugh with me instead of at me.”

Mae Martin at the Laughing Horse at City Cafe Free Festival at the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe, 2017. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

There’s a video on YouTube of her performing at 16, in character as a competitor in a public-speaking competition about “women in media”. The audience seems equal parts dazzled and confused by the combination of lonely desperation and Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsession she presents, in cropped hair and pinafore dress. These days audiences are less confused; instead of leading with her awkwardness, she explores it, performs it and invites us to laugh at it with her. Her most recent standup tours were Us, in 2015, about sex and gender identity, and Dope, in 2017, about addiction – both were turned into BBC radio shows.

“It was a slow process of getting closer and closer to my actual personality on stage. And now there’s very little separation. I definitely find the more open and vulnerable I am, the more people enjoy it,” she grins in understatement.

“The first time I saw Mae’s work,” the actor Ellen Page says via email, “I not only laughed so hard, I was struck by her honesty, vulnerability, intelligence and ability to tell personal stories that render them relatable to us all. I am inspired by Mae,” she adds, “and lucky to call her a friend.”

Today audiences treat Martin with a similarly delicate awe. Usually. “Well, I got heckled the other night. I was talking about gender identity and this woman shouted, ‘No one cares!’ It was so harsh, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Partly because I was in control and partly because, well, I replied something like, ‘The problem is that people actually care too much!’ There’s so much hysteria around gender, hysteria that comes from a place of misinformation and fear.” She shrugs. Chuckles. Once, a therapist warned her that if she completed therapy, she’d probably stop being funny. “I was, like, ‘I disagree.’ I knew my job was not mutually exclusive to happiness. I think she was romanticising that tortured-artist thing, which I don’t buy into any more. Really. If you’re unhappy, you can’t make anything.”

Dope, her show on addiction, took longer to brew. “Yeah, I needed enough distance from that time in my life to… retrospect. I approached it pretty academically and did tonnes of research and tried to make sense of it. And then I started telling my stories on stage and hoping the punchlines emerged.”

Feel Good comedy: (from left) Mae Martin, Charlotte Ritchie, Adrian Lukis and Lisa Kudrow. Photograph: Channel 4

What did she learn? “I guess the big realisation was that addiction isn’t really about substances. The definition that I use is from [writer and physician] Dr Gabor Maté, which is: addiction is something that you crave, find relief from and can’t give up, despite knowing the negative consequences.” Imagine, she asks her audiences, that they’ve just realised they’ve left their phone in the bar – they wouldn’t burst into tears, but the nagging anxiety, the need to touch it again, would mean they wouldn’t laugh for the rest of the show. “Right? His is such a broad definition and resonates with so many people, whether it’s our phones or food or sex or relationships. Things that we know are bad for us, but that soothe us when we’re finding the present moment difficult. Hearing that was kind of a breakthrough for me.”

Why? “Because I think I was patting myself on the back for getting off drugs and not realising, actually, that addictive behaviour was still permeating my life in a lot of ways. So that’s what the TV series is about.”

The TV series, yes. We are here to discuss Feel Good, a new Channel 4 comedy, co-written by and starring Martin as a comedian called Mae, navigating the sensitive dynamics of her NA group, a relationship with a straight girl (played by Charlotte Ritchie), and a strained bond with her mother, performed magnificently by Lisa Kudrow.

My sexuality is not a huge part of who I am. It’s not even a particularly interesting part

“The character Mae is where I was about 10 years ago. So it’s a pretty tenuous grip on sobriety, just fresh out of the depths of addiction and super manic. I have a pretty good hold on my life now – I’m pretty stable. But I definitely feel like, in a way… I miss her.” The old Mae is seen on screen as a panicked romantic who lies awake at night with her hands hovering in fists above her chest. “She’s a mess, with all her agony and ecstasy, but I do miss the optimism and naivety. I don’t miss the lows, but losing those sometimes means you don’t get the highs.”

Five years ago Martin transferred her addictive obsession on to this script, this series, and she digs her hands into her knees at the thought that soon it will be out, in the world, with all the judgment and mainstream fame that might mean. She wants to be clear: it is comedy, not therapy. “No this is not purely some cathartic therapeutic exercise for me. Me and Joe [Hampson, her co-writer] really just wanted to write a good comedy that had a lot of heart. It’s a work of fiction. But it’s got an emotional truth, because it’s based on experiences I’ve had. I’ve dated lots of girls who’ve never been with a girl before, for instance, which makes for quite a romantic and painful dynamic.”

And for all the pain of bleeding her own life into six half-hours, the surprise agony actually came from acting for the first time. “I sort of thought acting was just about arranging your face into emotions. I didn’t realise it was about actually allowing yourself to feel the feelings, then letting your face follow. That was a big learning curve.”

Actually allowing herself to feel the feelings has been a lesson in more ways than one. Since discussing her childhood and addictions on stage, Martin’s life has expanded, along with her career. “It’s enriching and cathartic to share things that your gut tells you are not all right to say. To say things that you’re embarrassed or ashamed of, and then have everybody go: ‘Me too.’ And the more specific and embarrassing, the more people seem to connect.” During her show about gender and sexuality, she witnessed lots of teenagers coming out to their friends and family.

‘It’s a work of fiction. But it’s got an emotional truth’: Mae Martin and Charlotte Ritchie in Feel Good. Photograph: Channel 4

After one show, a girl approached Martin with her father, before turning to him and saying, ‘Dad, I’m bisexual.’ “And do you know what he replied? ‘Me too.’” How did that feel? “It was cool! But I’m not a licensed family therapist, so it was also quite scary. Especially because then they wanted to go out to a club. I was like, ‘I’m gonna pass.’ With the next show, Dope, I saw a lot of addicts or people who have family members struggling with addictions. That was pretty wild. But I love it all.”

Last year she wrote a book for teenagers, a guide to 21st-century sexuality. “I had to constantly remind people that I’m just writing about my experiences. It’s different for everyone – the most important thing is not to be squeamish. Talking about sexuality and gender right now is so politicised, but imagine being a teenager in your first relationship, and how stressful it would feel if you were seeing your identity debated on Newsnight. And so I try to take a lighter look, and remind people that it’s supposed to be fun and also, that you don’t have to feel pressured to pick a certain label.” The book’s title is Can Everyone Please Calm Down?

As well as belly laughs, Martin’s audiences have become accustomed to feeling something slightly higher up: a light pressure on their heart, for example, or a tightening of the throat, or a small nudge on the brain. Her favourite comedians can, she says, “Do both – be really hilarious while also sneaking in a social message.” On stage she offers a critical analysis of contemporary obsessions, stories from her own life weaving through a theme, resulting in yes, punchlines, but also tight political conclusions – such as her insistence that we should eliminate labels like gay, straight, or bi.

Everyone needs to take a deep breath and look at the facts and not the headlines

“I’m all for people identifying however they want. But I’ve found that sometimes those labels bulldoze over nuance. My sexuality is not a huge part of who I am! It’s not even a particularly interesting part. Apparently 40% of people under 25 don’t identify as gay or straight any more. So I feel like that’s where we are heading. If we just assume everyone’s a bit gay, then we wouldn’t have to go through that quite harrowing process of declaring yourself to be something else. Yeah, I see a lot of benefits to not expecting everyone to declare who they are.”

I wonder whether researching her own life for a show has brought up any surprising realisations. “Well, one thing I found interesting is this false impression that gender fluidity or ‘dismantling the gender binary’ is a recent millennial fad, when, for centuries of human civilisation, there have been variances in gender. It’s actually quite a recent western thing to have such a strict gender binary. In 2018, India decriminalised homosexuality, and we celebrated it over here. But, England went into India and criminalised homosexuality in 1856! It’s the gaslighting that gets me. It’s like setting somebody’s house on fire and then going, ‘Argh, it’s taking me so long to put the fire out, like, it’s sooo hard.”

She is fun to sit with. An afternoon discussing social politics with a comedian more brusque or earnest than Martin would be a slightly exhausting prospect. But she treads so lightly and with such conviction that the segues from her coconut allergy to the reaction to strap-on dildos in Feel Good to trans rights carry me gently and jollily through our conversation. It’s only later, transcribing, that it strikes me how radical her post-identity politics might be.

“I totally understand people feeling overwhelmed, or feeling a sense of vertigo about how quickly things are changing. But everyone needs to take a deep breath and look at the facts and not the headlines.” She searches quickly for an example from life. “I remember when I first learned algebra and I got into this real angry panic because I was like, ‘I just figured out numbers – and now they’re introducing letters again?’” That was when she left school. “I think that’s the kind of thing people feel is happening now, and they’re panicking. But it’s actually not that confusing, if you listen properly.” Then she says something that, in 2020, feels oddly like the most radical concept of all. Martin leans in. “I’m a big advocate of the idea that ambiguity, of the idea that not knowing” – who you are, who you love, where to put your hands when you sleep, or why Bette Midler stirred such longing in a six-year-old Canadian child – “is fine.” Unexpectedly, I laugh.

Feel Good starts on 18 March at 10pm on Channel 4