From the beginning of vaudeville’s monopoly on entertainment through the 1930s, stand-up comedy was a simpler and more uniform medium. Jokes were passed around (sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly), and the premium was on laughs per minute and often formulaic punchlines. Comedy at this time was known to feature character work, physical gags, and racial stereotypes, and frequently was performed in double act and/or with music. Many of these comedians got their start in the Catskill Mountains, performing for vacationers in the Borscht Belt.
However, after the end of World War II, the American culture shifted direction, opening up the way for new styles of comedy. There are three main theories as to why this shift occurred. Some critics and cultural historians saw it as a death of innocence. Novelist Nelse Algren wrote, “This is an age of genocide. Falling on a banana peel used to be funny, but now it takes more to shock us. And there is no more fun in the old comedians.” Others saw it as result of uncertainty, because, to many Americans after the war, “The future seems so precarious, people are willing to abandon themselves to chaos. The new comics reflect this.” A third and equally compelling explanation points to the era’s rise in youth culture, and more specifically, a youth culture in revolt. “Of course youth has always been in revolt to some extent, but never as it is today,” waxed comedian Steve Allen, “it’s no surprise that the new comedians all have something pretty bitter and critical to say… and now there is a ready-made audience for them. The moment they’re discovered they’re national heroes.” Likely it was the combination of all three of these reasons that led to a change from joke-teller comedians to comedians who were sounding more like preachers, teachers, and social provocateurs.
The most notable change during this revolution comes down to two key elements: authenticity and vulnerability. Comedians moved away from relying on gimmicks or schticks and into something more honest and more truly themselves. While many “old-school” comedians persisted, a divide emerged between what Steve Allen called “comedians who are humorists and the comedians who are just marvelous comedy performers.” Excepting a few rare cases such as Will Rogers or Moms Mabley, stand-up comedy didn’t change in any real or drastic way until the 1950s, when comedians like Mort Sahl, Redd Foxx and Lenny Bruce emerged on the scene. These comedians brought with them a new approach to stand-up comedy and widened the possibilities of what it could be. These comedians were some of the first to talk about real issues on stage, things that were previously off-limits such as “race relations, sex, religion, police methods, censorship, and drugs.” These comedians shocked the world and began turning comedy from a shallow and broad form of entertainment into a medium for expression. Comedy, in many ways, is a trick. It is manipulation to ease your audience into a sense of comfort, and then guiding them into these, often dark, tunnels and thought experiments. Comedians in the late 1950s and early 1960s changed up the game by bringing the public world on stage, but it wasn’t until a decade later that comedians began to bring their private world up on stage too. Richard Pryor did something that would forever change the industry, and turned stand-up comedy into what it is today -- something worthy of that grandeur I so enjoy elucidating.
Richard Pryor’s vulnerability was at its most potent when it revealed things about his life that were less than idyllic. Throughout the length of his life Pryor dealt with a whole host of personal struggles, most of which found their way into his routines. “He was enormously self-destructive,” writes comedian Robert Klein, “But then he was so honest about talking about it, these self-confessions, but they were so funny that they weren’t self-pitying.” His pain was never twisted or distorted for the sake of the laugh, and it was that believability that was the hallmark of his success. Of this Carlin writes, “There was so much pain in Richard’s work, that was wonderful.” His most infamous personal incident occurred in 1980 when, in a freebase cocaine-induced craze, he doused himself with rum and lit himself on fire. He was rushed to the hospital and treated for burns that covered over half of his body. He would delight a crowd with an account of this incident in Live on the Sunset Strip, a comedy special released two years later in 1982 and arguably his best work. Holding a lit match in front of his face he jokes, “There goes Richard Pryor, running down the street.”
After Pryor came a wave of truth-telling, soul-bearing, warts-and-all memoirist comedians. Many of the biggest comedians from the past fifty years have found success by treating the stage like a diary or a therapy session. Not all memoirist comics are self-destructive, with greats like Brian Regan, Jim Gaffigan, and John Mulaney telling humorous stories that typically stick to the light and the charming side of things. Memoirist types of comedians do tend to slant dark, however, and there are a few explanations for why this might be. First of all, it is a simple truth that making people laugh is harder when you’re telling a story that starts well and ends well. Audience respond to a little grit or some hijinks. Trouble is more likely to be funny, especially when you’re the butt of it all. The other reasons might come back to the age-old trope that comedians are all troubled, drug-addicted head cases, and when they tell their stories, those stories are dark ones. Harry Shearer said that comedians are comedians in order to try and control why people laugh at them, which presupposes that they are going to be laughed at.
Memoirists comedians typically have fiercely loyal followings, due to the parasocial relationship that is often cultivated between them and their fans through the vulnerability of their material. This phenomenon multiplied with the advent of audio podcasts, as fans were treated to seemingly private conversations and monologues from their favorite comics. There is one comedians who seems to personify the power of the podcast and the spirit of the memoirist comedian, and that person is Marc Maron. In his nearly 30 years of experience on stage, Maron has never been anything but himself. This got him into lots of hot water over the years, personally and professionally. Maron’s podcast WTF with Marc Maron launched in 2009 and had twenty million downloaded in just two years. He’s connected with people of all ages and backgrounds and made for himself a world where he can continue pouring his heart into his work and his microphones.
In 2012, Marc Maron sat down with Pete Holmes on Pete’s podcast You Made It Weird (which Holmes’ admits without much prodding wouldn’t exist without the influence of WTF). Holmes’ public personality isn’t unlike that of a happy, dumb gold retriever, but the two men found that they had more in common than they realized. “The similarity between us,” Maron said, “Is that we’ll go ahead and shoot our mouths off because we need to talk, we think we need to talk this shit through and we’ll blather on. I’ll do it in an angry sort of cutting way, and you’ll do it in a goofy way, but there’s something to be said about not saying anything.” “Yeah,” Holmes responded, “That doesn’t seem to be an option for either of us.” It is this unflinching honesty, even in times when the world didn’t seem to want to hear it, that turned Maron into the angry, muddled memoirist comedian with the heart of gold that his legions of fans not only revere but rely on.
Marc Maron has been a fighter since minute one. He was born in 1963, and according to his mother, he was a diaphragm baby. “Which in my mind means I have an innate ability to overcome obstacles,” writes Maron, “... God, I was ambitious when I had a tail.” Marcus David Maron was born in a Jewish household in New Jersey to parents Barry and Toby Maron. He lived in Jersey until he was six years old when his family moved to Alaska for two years. His father’s job with the US Air Force brought them to Anchorage where he served out his medical residency. Two years later, his father left the air force and the family settled to Albuquerque, NM, as Marc was just entering third grade.
Marc’s father Barry was an orthopedic surgeon, and he started his own practice when they arrived in Albuquerque. Barry was a diagnosed manic-depressive whose love and attention was hard to come by. Marc has remarked that he has trouble accepting the diagnosis, seeing his father instead as simply an irretrievably narcissist. He has memories of his mother telling him, “Go upstairs and makes your father laugh, you’re the only one who can.” Marc’s mother Toby is what he calls a “Professional Anorexic.” In his 2013 special, Maron tells the audience, “If you were to ask my mother, ‘What do you do for a hobby?’ She way say, ‘I maintain a weight of 116 pounds.’” When she was a girl, she had a cruel grandmother who would make her eat, and she sees this as the root of her later obsession with her weight. Maron himself was an overweight child, and this often caused tension between him and his mother, frequently leaving him feeling guilt and depression.
On stage Maron tells a particularly relatable story about missing an important catch during a little league game as a child. He refers to himself throughout in third person as “Fat Marc.” In the story, he’s in the outfield when he hears the unmistakable crack of the bat and a fly ball comes towards him. In an attempt to get under it, he trips and the ball hits him in the face. “I think if I caught that ball, I’d have been a better person,” He laughs. “I wouldn’t be up here talking to you. I think I would have been a well-adjusted person.” I’m not sure where the fun would be in that.
Maron spent much of his youth working jobs in the service industry and playing guitar. “I was never a disciplined person,” He tells Pete Holmes in an interview. “I never did a lot of homework. I didn’t understand how people compartmentalized their life. I didn’t have parents that guided me through school, so I was always sorta in this search for a sense of self.” When he speaks about his parents, it is typically not in terms of trauma or abuse, but of neglect. His father was frightening and rageful in his manic states, but as a surgeon mainly kept himself busy or was away with his work. His mother was often lost in her own world, and has even later remarked to Maron that in those early years she didn’t really know how to love him. Marc has a younger brother, Craig, who he rarely mentions. In an interview he says that Craig “Got lost in the shuffle.” To which the interview responded, “The shuffle of two?”
From a young age, Maron was fascinated with stand-up comedy and it quickly became his solace on bad days:
“When I was kid watching comedians on TV and listening to their records they were the only ones that could make it all seem okay. They seemed to cut through the bullshit and disarm fears and horror by being clever and funny. I don’t think I could have survived my childhood without watching standup comics. When I started doing comedy I didn’t understand show business. I just wanted to be a comedian.”
There is something very pure about the way Maron seems to have fallen in love with stand-up. He seems hooked on the clarity and the power of a comedian. Not power as in strengths or resources, but the power to change out perception or reality-- especially our own realities. The comics Maron refers to in the above quote are comics who have no time for rules, comics who refuse to play the game. Afterall, a comedian’s greatest assest is that, in a very real sense, the rules don’t apply to them.
Marc attended Highland High School in Albuquerque, which is where, as he says, the problems “All came together to create the defense, slightly aggravated, neurotic, panicky man that I am.” Maron and his family were culturally Jewish and he had a bar mitzvah as a young teen, but the time he was truly confronted with his heritage was one day as a high school sophomore when we was leaving school. He was walking over to his Datsun to drive home when he saw people laughing and hundled around his car. When he got through the crowd, he saw that his car had been covered with anti-semitic writing and swastikas. When he looked closer, he saw that all of the graffiti had been done in Arby’s sauce packets. Needless to say, upon graduating Maron packed his bags and went far away from New Mexico.
Maron left to start college at Boston University. He graduated in 1982 with an honors degree in English Literature. His graduation day wasn’t exactly what he had imagined. “It was supposed to be my day,” He writes in his memoir, “But when we had a moment alone in the car, me sitting there in my graduation robe, my father looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’” While college wasn’t really his scene, so to speak, it was there in Boston that Maron began inching his way into the comedy world. He placed second in a regional competition sponsored by the radio station WBCN. He spent his twenties in the clubs around Boston such as the infamous Ding Ho or Nick’s at the Kowloon. He didn’t start doing comedy seriously until the late eighties, when he began regularly going on the road. The road is the part of the journey to becoming a comic that puts young talent to the test. Often referred to as “babysitting drunks,” road gigs can easily become hell gigs, and staying the course takes a big dose of masochism. Or without masochism, it takes an even bigger dose of commitment and a side of delusion to survive. Luckily, Maron has all three.
Maron honed his skills out on the road, opening and doing shows all over New England. I don’t know that I ever got into comedy to be an entertainer, as much as I got into comedy to be visible.” Maron told an interviewer. “To be like, I’m here.” In those early years, Maron made himself visible in every way he could. He did comedy in pubs, bars, bowling alleys, hotel conference rooms, dance clubs, college cafeterias, patios, parks, boats, and people’s homes. As he puts it, “any type of venue other than one that was conducive to performing comedy.” While he was taking this time to learn how to perform and finding his voice as a comic, much of the experiences are overshadowed by the drugs and alcohol he was viciously consuming at the time. On the road he developed addictions to alcohol and to cocaine, in keeping with the stereotypes of 1980s comedians. He went to rehab for a month or so in 1988, but the sobriety he found there only lasted about a year before he relapsed. A young comic’s life on the road is not an easy one, and it was almost too easy to medicate lonely hotel rooms with unhealthy lifestyle choices. “I’m under the impression that if you go out on the road,” Maron tells an audience, “whether it’s for business or pleasure, and you stay at a hotel alone for at least a night, at some point in your stay you will find yourself in that hotel room alone, thinking this: I want to fucking kill myself.”
Maron lived in Los Angeles for a few years where he met Sam Kinison, a fellow comedian who also had a lot to yell about. He performed regularly in clubs around the city, and worked the door at The Comedy Store for a short while before moving to San Francisco briefly and then returning to the east coast. In the early 1990s, Maron was living and performing in New York City. He found some kindred spirits in the Lower East Side comedy clubs, where he became a staple of the alternative comedy scene in New York.
Despite his temperament and his years on the road, Maron fit in surprisingly well in the alternative comedy scene. Maron performed in clubs such as The Luna Lounge and began to be a part of a real community. He earned the nickname “Angry Comedy Dad,” and Patrice O’Neal would call all the younger alt comedians Maron’s children. He was hired as the host for a short-lived Comedy Central short Short Attention Span Theater, which was cancelled in 1994. However, his addictions and his bad behavior were preventing his career from progressing as he hoped, and he was beginning to see comedians that he started with surpassing him. Maron found himself becoming embittered and sinking further into his vices. “When we met, I thought he was a brilliant comedian, one of the best I’d ever seen,” says Patton Oswalt, who met Maron in 1992. “One of the best I’d ever seen, and one of the biggest douche bags I’d ever met.”
At his brother’s wedding in the early nineties, Maron met Kim Reiss. She was the maid of honor and he was the best man. The two began dating and their relationship progress quickly. “I was all fucked up on drugs at the time,” writes Maron. “So within a few weeks, I’d move my boxes into her apartment and terrorized her into loving me.” In his eyes, he was the black sheep of the family, and while he was her ticket out of middle-class Jeweyness, she was his ticket back in. In many ways, this relationship was Maron attempting a normal life. The two were married in 1997 after dating for six years. Marc writes, “Her dad was a psychiatrist. In retrospect, he must not have been a very good one, I mean, he let her marry me.”
Unfortunately, his marriage saw the worst years of his addiction, as he continued to watch his other comedians climb the ladder around him. He had been rejected from SNL, and people such as Louis CK or Jon Stewart, who were once his contemporaries, were rapidly finding success. He was popular on Conan and a few other shows, but there seemed to be nothing coming his way. “I would lie in bed blasted on coke with my heart exploding out of my chest next to somebody sleeping comfortably,” he remembers, “And I wanted to wake her up to tell her I was dying but I would’ve rather just died.” Even more unfortunately, his sobriety came in the form of another woman.
In 1999, Maron met Mishna Wolff after a set in New York. She approached him and said that he was looking really unwell, offering to take him to meetings and talk about getting sober. “I don’t know if I really wanted to get sober,” Maron later told Terry Gross, “But I wanted to be with her.” The two began an affair and, to her credit, Maron was able to become sober. Last summer he celebrated his 17th year clean. He often jokes about this period of his life, saying, “There is something to be said about doing a lot of drugs at some point in your life. I personally don’t have a lot of respect for people to don’t have the courage to lose complete control of their life for a few years.” Like a true comedian, Maron is adept at framing things in whatever way he chooses.
In 2000, Marc found a first glimpse at success with his one-man show, The Jerusalem Syndrome, that had a limited off-Broadway run and he later turned into a book. Still, his personal life was in upheaval. Marc left his wife the following year, and later moved to Los Angeles with Mishna, whom he married in 2004. It was at this time that he began taking in strays. In a pretty real way, Maron traded drugs for feral cats. There were a few of them that hung around outside his Queens apart, and he took it upon himself to be their savior. “I liked their energy,” He wrote. “I like anything I have to fight to get to like me.” Although they tore up his apartment (and his arms), he somehow managed to connect with a few of them, and ended up bring two to LA and they still live with him today. Maron understanding this part of himself, writing, “I think the impulse to save animals is, aside from being empathetic and humane, also symbolic of saving some part of ourselves. I wanted these cats to be okay. I wanted to be okay.”
While living in LA, Maron got a job offer to host a liberal morning radio show produced by Air America. The show was based in New York, so he began living back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. His home and his wife were in LA, and he visited some weekends and anytime he could get away. The show required him to go to sleep incredibly early so that he could be up by around 2:30am, in the studio by 4:00am, and on the air by 6:00am. The show was on air during some of the bleakest hours of the Bush administration. This was a rough lifestyle and his comedy career and his marriage took a hit from the strain of the work. Beyond the aggression, the fighting, and the long-distance, his marriage to Mishna ended primarily because of his lack of discretion when discussing their relationship onstage. She inevitably left him, and he found himself heartbroken, alone, and with no career prospects to speak of.
This is the part of Maron’s life that is easy to romanticize. It is charming in that tortured-artist kind of way. The main appeal of such desperation is that, at least in literature, it usually comes before the big break. Maron is no exception and we’re getting to his big break, but I don’t want to misrepresent this crucial time in his career. Around 2008, Maron wasn’t what I would call an unsuccessful comedian. He had hosted a few short-lived TV shows, he had an off-Broadway show, a book, and two comedy albums. That being said, I also wouldn’t say he was particularly funny. At best, he was an acquired taste. As he said in an interview, “I don’t have mass appeal. I seem to be attracting not a demographic as much as a disposition.” His bitterness bled into his material to such a degree that it was sometimes hard to find the joke. His situation was not unlike the later works of comedian Bill Hicks, whose material lost its punch when it evolved from jokes into rants. For example, here’s a joke from a pre-2008 Marc Maron at a comedy festival in Winnipeg: “I guess I’ll watch some television, get some ideas for jokes. Jesus Christ, how much Jon Stewart does this planet need? I’m funnier and smarter and better looking than this Jewish pander-monkey! How much do they need!?” While people in the audience seemed to be laughing, there’s a real anger and insecurity in his voice that is particularly unsettling. Terry Gross remarks, “He wishes his imagination were fueled by something other than panic and dread. I think he’s short-changing himself by leaving out jealousy and anger.”
“25 years in and I had nothing,” Maron says. His manager told him he was unbookable and without options. At this time he was contemplating killing himself. Grasping at straws, Maron decided to start a podcast. He called it WTF with Marc Maron, because that was the question he seemed to always be asking. He asked some of his friends to appear as guests, and he turned his old garage into a ramshackle little studio. The podcast is still running today and it comes out twice a week. It centers around in-depth conversations with comedians and other public figures of note. Given Maron’s personality, the show has a tendency of not shying away from difficult topics. The beauty is that Maron is so giving of his own struggles and vices, and his guests are usually willing to reciprocate his emotional goodwill. Afterall, it's easier to tell a story to Marc in his garage than it would be to tell someone in an overlit studio with fancy equipment and an audio engineer in the background. “Marc is an insightful interviewer and therapist of sorts,” writes Judd Apatow. “I don’t prep much for interviews,” He says, “I prepare to talk, to engage, to be emotionally available for an authentic exchange. If I got one of those per episode I’d be happy, but I usually get many more than that.”
Each episode is opened and closed by an introduction and a closing recorded by Maron after the interview, which gives him the opportunity to speak directly to his audience, sharing updates and speaking his mind. His home has come to be known as “The Cat Ranch” to fans who follow the adventures of Marc and his flock of feral felines. Maron became a broadcaster and interview of his own making, without any pushing or pulling from the industry, and finally began to see the success and recognition he had been working towards for the past 20 years.
There’s endless meaning to be found in the realization that Maron was planning on killing himself in that same garage a few years prior, and now he’s doing the most impactful, successful work he’s ever done from that same garage. From that garage he’s had a conversation with Louis CK about how he had abandoned Louis out of jealousy and insecurity. He supported fellow comedian Todd Glass when Glass chose WTF as the place to come out of the closet, after years of hiding his true self from the comedy community. He also had darker moments in that garage, such as questioning Gallagher about some of his xenophobia comments, leading to Gallagher storming out in the middle of the interview, or speaking frankly with Robin Williams about Robin’s relapse after twenty years of sobriety. A particular point of pride of WTF is episode #613, which came out in the summer of 2015. The Cat Ranch and that same old garage played host to President Barack Obama, who sat with Marc and chatted openly about his life, his marriage, and his struggles with the tasks ahead of him.
There are many ways in which WTF worked. The first is publicly and critically. Maron’s podcast WTF with Marc Maron launched in 2009 and had twenty million downloaded in just two years. It developed a loyal following, and comedians, writers, musicians, and other public figures came from everywhere to hang out in Marc Maron’s garage. Maron is “The primary success story of the genre … any comic with success in podcasts owes him a debt of gratitude,” says historian Kliph Nesteroff. WTF also saved Maron’s career. He is no longer “unbookable”, and since the launch of the podcast he’s produced three new albums, a Netflix special, a memoir, and an ongoing IFC show entitled Maron, currently in its fourth season. He gave the keynote speech at the 2011 Montreal Just For Laughs festival, and he’s become a household name for comedy fans everywhere.
Interestingly, Maron’s shows have been known be among the top sellers of single-ticket sales, meaning that audience members are turning out to go to his shows by themselves. This is likely related to his strong temperament and the fact that at times he does remain an acquired taste, but I also think this speaks to the fact that his podcast creates a strong parasocial relationship within its fanbase. His audience knows him. They feel as though they’re friends with him. They’ve been with him on good days and on bad ones. This is a memoirist comedian operating at their finest. When Maron was introduced on stage for his 2013 special, the MC didn’t say “Welcome to the stage, the famous comedian Marc Maron!” The MC said, “Welcome to the stage our friend Marc Maron!”
On a deeper level, WTF saved Maron’s life is a very tangible way. “I’d lost my ability to really listen and enjoy the company of other people,” Maron tells NPR, “Because of that my joy came back. My ability to laugh came back.” If you listen to material from Maron after the start of WTF, you won’t find rants about Jon Stewart or line after line and how unfair and corrupt the world is. What you’ll hear are stories. “I do not write jokes,” He says, “I write moments. Thoughts. Fragments that I have to sweat over as if they’re cryptic texts in a lost language when I try to interpret them.” Maron is a memoirist, and if you want to listen, he’ll tell you stories about his life, about his relationships, about the dark days of his early career, and about all the amazing people he’s met through his show. He starts one of his recent sets by walking on stage, sitting on the stool and addressing the audience as if they were one, unified voice, as if they’re a friend on the other end of the line when he’s recording his podcast monologues. “So, what’s happening?” He offers. “What do you want to talk about? You want to do the act, or… I don’t know. Let’s not. Let’s just work through some stuff.” WTF taught Maron how to listen and to engage emotionally with someone else’s story, which has brought a humanity and a humility into his heart and his material.
WTF also helped save the comedy community. With the slew of interview podcasts it spawned, because most every comedian worth their salt has their own podcast now, Maron created a market for comedians to stop, sit, and talk to one another. Their industry is often a lonely one, and Maron’s work helped to strengthen the community by curating a space for comedians to have honest and authentic conversations.
In 2011, Marc Maron gave a keynote address to a room full of comedians. “Welcome to the Montreal JFL Comedy Festival and fuck you, some of you, you know who you are. Wait. Sorry. That was the old me. I would like to apologize for being a dick just there.” He speaks of his journey and how the podcast saved him. At the end, he offers up what he’s learned: “After 25 years of doing stand up and the last two years of having long conversations with over 200 comics I can honestly say they are some of the most thoughtful, philosophical, open-minded, insightful, talented, self-centered, neurotic, compulsive, angry, fucked up, sweet, creative people in the world.” I hope he considers himself an intergral part of that species.