Comedian Maria Bamford navigates the weirdness to find her happy places

When Maria Bamford performs stand-up Thursday night at the Folly Theater, fans may get a preview of a special she’ll shoot for Netflix in November.

“I’ve been working on enough material to make up an hour for about four years now,” she said recently from Washington, D.C. “When I have an hour, that’s when I ask my manager to see if anybody is interested.”

Then, as she is wont to do, she slipped into another voice, something resembling Ben Stein in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

“Is anybody interested in this? Anybody? Anyone?” she said, laughing.

You wouldn’t find many to bet against her now. That includes the host of CBS’ “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert. When she appeared on his show in January, he told her, “You are my favorite comedian on Planet Earth.”

Since 1998, Bamford has gone from writer and voice actress to a standout on Patton Oswalt’s “Comedians of Comedy” tour and eventual star of “Lady Dynamite,” which debuted this year and was renewed this summer for a second season.

The last few years have been particularly busy for Bamford — “I’m always hustlin’,” she said.

She’s not kidding. Bamford has voiced characters on “Bob’s Burgers” and “Adventure Time With Finn and Jake” and appeared on “Arrested Development” and “Louie.” She also recently filmed an episode of IFC’s “Portlandia.”

For years, she has been a staple of online comedy, from “The Special Special Special” (originally for Chill.com and now on Netflix) to Yahoo’s “Talking Tom and Friends.”

The accolades and steady high-profile roles are well-deserved, but she’s pretty humble about her work. When asked about the new material she’s putting together, she says it isn’t all that different from the old stuff.

“I do talk a little about mental health issues and a little about marriage and a little about my community and that’s about it,” she said. “I’m not breaking any new ground. It’s the human experience. I’m not taking you into outer space.”

But “the little about mental health issues” is what has been revolutionary about her work. Her openness about her mental health struggles is the basis of “Lady Dynamite.”

On the series, Bamford plays a version of herself, an actress navigating the weirdness of Hollywood after treatments and hospitalizations for mental breakdowns. “Lady Dynamite” goes to some dark places, but she’s incredibly happy with how it turned out.

“It was a real group effort,” she said. “It wasn’t just my voice, which I think is wonderful. That was my hope — that I could learn to work with other people. I have not had that experience in life due to my job choice as a comedian.”

What’s perhaps most surprising about “Dynamite” is that Bamford, who specializes in vignettes about her own feelings of strangeness, plays the straightwoman to the so-called “normal” world around her.

“I think I was surprised by that, too, but it was so wonderful having all the different characters to showcase the beautiful work of so many other comics,” she said.

Among those comics: Ana Gasteyer as a foul-mouthed agent and Patton Oswalt as a bicycle cop and unofficial show adviser. Ed Begley Jr. plays her father, and Mary Kay Place plays her mom.

“My mom was very happy that Mary Kay Place was so slender and good-looking,” Bamford said. “They ended up talking for several hours.”

Writers are working on the second season, which will begin production in January. Bamford says she doesn’t have much input, and that’s fine by her.

“The writers are all lovely people,” she said. “I go in and I laugh and I eat something with kale in it, but it’s Beverly Hills so it’s massaged kale.”

She’s hoping the second season will explore what happens when someone with mental health issues has someone else in their life experience mental health issues.

“My mom had a manic episode, and I was surprised how upsetting that was to me,” she said. “She had kind of paranoid delusions. It was scary for me as a daughter to have my mom acting very bizarrely. My hope is that the second season addresses what happens when you’re the person who is well and then someone else is struggling.”

Bamford, 46, recently married artist Scott Marvel Cassidy, whom she said she met through OKCupid.

Married life, she said, is “awesoooooome! It’s really fun.” But the couple needed some support before they got hitched.

“Both of us are old. Neither of us knew what we were doing, so we decided we were going to get a team together to help us figure it out,” she said. “We got into therapy, like three months into dating. And it has genuinely helped so much. I know I only speak for myself, but I think we’re both very happy.”