It seems Demetri Martin has been invisible lately. We used to see him on the telly all the time with his comedy specials and TV series and as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Not so much these days. But he hasn’t been lying low at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. The standup comic with the mop-top and dry one-liners has been hard at work. It’s just a different kind of work.

He’s busy editing an independent movie he wrote, directed, and starred in called Dean (also starring Kevin Kline and Mary Steenburgen), has a regular part on Showtime’s House of Lies, and has been working on his third book, this one of short stories.

But now it’s time to get back up on-stage. Martin, along with Jon Dore, Todd Glass, and Levi MacDougall, is touring Western Canada with Just for Laughs. That’s a solid night of laughs any way you look at it.

“I think everybody’s different enough from each other. They’re complementary sensibilities,” Martin tells the Georgia Straight. “I think the shows should have a nice vibe to them. It’s cool that we have a couple Canadian folks on the tour,” he adds, referring to Dore and MacDougall, the latter of whom Martin discovered while searching the Net and hired to write on House of Lies. “I saw his standup online and I was like, ‘I like this guy,’ ” he says. “I think he’s really surprising and inventive. And he’s a good guy. It’s nice when you find comics you just get along with. There’s just a mellowness, and you can hang out and it’s not like being on all the time.”

There was a time, as a younger comedian, when Martin loved being funny on- and off-stage. These days, he much prefers reining it in during his downtime, when not delivering such gems as “Every fight is a food fight if you’re a cannibal” and “I think statues are great. They show what great people would look like if a bird shit all over them.”

“I love comedy and I love jokes and I love joking around, but I don’t know if maybe being on-stage just balanced me out enough so it’s like, great, I can go do that there, I get attention and feel validated, and then I don’t have to worry about it. I can just be kind of quiet and do my thing when I’m off-stage. I’m definitely not on all the time. I mean, I might not even be on enough of the time for the job that I’m doing, I don’t know.”

It’s all he can do to keep up with his social-media obligations, something he entered into only because impersonators were out there pretending to be him. Now he’s on Twitter, where he serves up more pith like “So many logistical nightmares. So few logistical dreams” and “Don’t be so quick to judge others. Take your time and really get into it.”

“I find it frustrating,” he says of social media. “It’s coercive because you kind of have to do it, otherwise your public identity is up for grabs. Of course, there are benefits and I can tell people about my shows, so I gotta be realistic about it. There’s plenty of good. But the more social media there is and the more content and camera phones and Twitter, it’s like the more interested I am in privacy because it just seems so elusive, so hard to actually have privacy. Now, I could just not be in the business. I could just choose to do something else. So it’s not that simple. But there’s some sort of a balance there where it’s nice to still be invisible.”

Demetri Martin performs with the Just for Laughs Canadian Comedy Tour at the Orpheum on Friday (November 14).