Zoe Coombs Marr is sitting in a room at home with a recent development in her professional career. “Two computer screens,” she says, wide-eyed and motioning at them with delight. “It’s changed my life. I like having lots of different tabs open, lots of good big spreadsheets and documents all open side by side at the same time. It’s a visual thing rather than a neck thing. Love it.”

The dual display innovation began when she was working on Queerstralia, the ACCTA-nominated, three-part ABC documentary series she created and hosted about the untold queer history of Australia.

“I’ve got two keyboards and a mouse and I can go like this.” She moves her head up, then swiftly left and back around like she’s stationed in a vast NASA control screen headquarters monitoring multiple rocket launches.

“Oh and there I am with the cupboard open,” she says, noticing the packed, un-shut wardrobe visible behind. “Oh well. There’s nothing scandalous in there. It’s just stuff.”

She turns around. “There is literally a box there that says ‘stuff’.”

A performer, writer, artist and comedian, Coombs Marr is known for many things. Most recently it has been Queerstralia but also several years hosting Mardi Gras on SBS TV, appearing on The Weekly, Spicks and Specks, The Project, Question Everything and Celebrity Mastermind and opening for good friend Hannah Gadsby’s globally successful shows Nanette and Douglas.

And then there are the years of critically acclaimed and award-winning stand-up shows, from Trigger Warning and The Opener, two of her shows as alter-ego character Dave, to Bossy Bottom, Agony! Misery! and Born Slippy.

Now, she is all about stuff. The stuff in that box in the wardrobe, the stuff accumulated, digitally, physically and mentally, marking every moment since she was born. It will all come together for her new show, Every Single Thing In My Whole Entire Life, premiering at the Adelaide Fringe in March before seasons at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and in Sydney.

“I’m going all the way back,” she says. “I’ve got an Excel spreadsheet and everything is going on it and that is what the show’s about.”

The spreadsheet, visible to audience members each performance, features different tabs and lists including, “Things I Like”, “Things I Don’t Like” and “Things I Like that Most Other People Do Like”. The latter includes live music, games and sports.

There are tabs listing her relationships, with examples including, “1st gf”, “Painter”, “Stage Manager”, “Police Officer” and “Memory Trumpet”. Memory Trumpet alludes to a girl she first saw playing Memory on the trumpet.

Other tabs include “Hook-ups” (Memory Trumpet also features), “Bad Art”, “Injuries Accidents”, “Times My Sister Tried To Kill Me” and one called “Cate Blanchett”, which is about the time she received flowers after a stage performance at Sydney Theatre Company and the sender was mistaken for a major Australian movie star.

Coombs Marr began percolating the idea for Every Single Thing In My Whole Entire Life in 2023. “I didn’t do a stand-up show last year because I was working on Queerstralia,” she says. “The show that I’d done the year before was a Dave show and Agony! Misery! and Bossy Bottom, the two stand-up shows that I did before that were as myself.

“I suppose I was in that space after making Queerstralia. It was quite an intense project. Amazing, incredible to work on, but very intensive and a lot of responsibility as well. A lot of politics, a lot of community engagement and making sure you’re telling other people’s stories correctly.

“I hadn’t really done a fun stand-up show as myself for quite some time. And also, because my work is often meta – Dave is very much about how comedy works – I realised I hadn’t talked about myself on-stage much.

“It was probably from hanging out with a lot of comedians who really mine their own lives. I realised I had this untouched mine of my life about which I’ve always thought, ‘Oh, it’s a bit boring just to talk about stuff that’s happened to me’. Like, my life’s not really that interesting.

“But then I started looking into my own memory and thinking, ‘Well, what could I talk about?’ As soon as I started that, I was, ‘Oh, there’s so much stuff in here, there’s so much stuff to talk about’.”

Rather than crafting a story, or talking about a particular event, Coombs Marr became intrigued about completing a stocktake, a process of getting all her affairs in order and seeing the shape of her life. “Most of the stuff that makes up the shape of our lives is the little stuff that’s happening all the time, alongside all the big things. I thought it was really fun and funny to focus on the minutia and put that all together.”

Cue Excel spreadsheets in multiple windows across two screens with ever-increasing tabs linking to longer and longer lists of memories and details and people and the finer points of a life.

“It’s like when you’re talking about a funeral or a wedding or a birth,” she says. “I’ve experienced all those sorts of different things in my life but no one ever talks about how, when you’re at a funeral, you still need to go to the toilet. Or, on the way to the wedding, it’s a little bit hot in the car?”

But how does Coombs Marr remember all of this? Has she kept every chip packet, every jotted note, journal entry, joke idea or photo of every major, minor and in-between person or event in her life?

“It’s interesting what you remember and what you don’t,” she says. “When I talk to people, it sparks an interesting process where they spout things back to me. Like, ‘Oh yeah, that priest had the worst breath’, which is then, ‘Oh my god, that was really similar to this smell that I smelled at Dreamworld when I was on the school excursion in year seven and that guy was there and, oh, he contacted me on Facebook last week’. It’s almost like this constellation of connections and I think that’s how we all work.”

The mapping and archiving of Coombs Marr’s life, a consuming rabbit hole lasting months, left her feeling strange and uncomfortable at times.

“When you look at your own diary from the outside, and you see yourself as a person who exists, it’s the most excruciating, cringeworthy thing in the world,” she says. “With looking at everything in my whole life, it comes down to, ‘What is the thing that’s been happening through this one lens? That’s the thread that holds it all together. What is my existence actually?’

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“It’s fun as well. It’s a really positive show and it comes from quite a dark place, ironically. I was struggling a lot with my mental health and feeling pretty at odds with my existence. The process of doing this has been really interesting because it comes from this existential crisis. But also it’s life-affirming. It’s: ‘Wow, there’s this bulk of this hefty, amazing life that I’ve lived.’ It’s equally full of chip packets and stepping on dog poo and forgetting someone’s name and minutia and nothingness. So it matters and it doesn’t matter at all.”

It’s been five years since Coombs Marr last did personal stand-up and 20 years since she began in comedy. After turning 40 this year, she felt a sense of self-acceptance about her life and career.

“This is probably the first time I’m doing a stand-up show where I’m actually comfortable in my own skin as a person, and as a stand-up,” she says. “And, it’s probably the first time I’m giving myself permission to just do stand-up and just be there with the crowd.

“I’m doing it in an absolutely nuts way by going, ‘I’m gonna talk about everything in my whole entire life’, which is the joke, but it’s also a very straightforward stand-up show. It’s the most relaxed kind of show that I’ve done, really, ever. So, that’s delightful.”

Every Single Thing In My Whole Entire Life does not mean she is retiring Dave, her Barry Award-winning, Edinburgh Fringe-nominated hack stand-up caricature built from the comedy scene’s healthy and long-standing tenets of sexism, misogyny and toxic masculinity.

And it’s also unlike the last time she performed as herself in 2018’s Bossy Bottom, which garnered critical acclaim, an Amazon Prime comedy special, a Helpmann Awards Best Comedy Performer nomination and a prestigious Herald Angel Award in Edinburgh.

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That’s because Coombs Marr, Grafton-born and “she/her with a they/them rising”, is still living the life she is mining.

“Every show, of course, is then another thing that’s in my life as well,” she says. “So even through the process of one sitting of the show, that’s one hour more of material.

“It is a crafted show, but there’s also little openings throughout where the audience can lead it a little bit. We’ve been playing around with where people yell out, ‘What’s that Timothee Chalamet bit?’ Or ‘Tell us about the van.’ Or what does ‘Stinky art school mean?’ Then I can tell those stories, too.”

But detailed spreadsheets and organised tabs and catalogued folders and packed boxes called “Stuff” are one thing. Coombs Marr’s sheer love of live performance, and the sense of comic maelstrom she retains within it, will forever fire her live stand-up.

“It’s just chaos held back occasionally by a very thin veneer of chill.”

Zoe Coombs Marr’s show Every Single Thing In My Whole Entire Life is at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from March 28 to April 21; and The Grand Electric, Surry Hills, on May 18. Go to comedy.com.au for full details.