Marc Maron recently announced he would end his podcast, “WTF,” in the fall, and the response from comedians, especially those a generation or two younger than him, has been strikingly personal.
On Instagram, Rosebud Baker described listening to hundreds of episodes of “WTF” as a kind of school for stand-up, while Dan Rosen told me that he was disappointed he never got to be on the show and that every one of his peers fantasized about telling their life stories on it. “I didn’t have Johnny’s couch,” the stand-up Mike Lawrence wrote in a social media post, referring to “The Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson: “My generation of comics coming up had Marc’s garage,” where the podcast initially originated.
Maron was neither the first stand-up to have a podcast nor the most popular (that would be Joe Rogan, who started a few months after Maron in 2009). But he was the most important to the art of comedy. Long before it became common practice, Maron proved that you could become a star by going around the usual gatekeepers and that large audiences would listen loyally to two comics talking shop at length.
Like so many trailblazers of new digital forms, he has become one of its harshest critics. “I feel like I released the Kraken,” he told John Mulaney on the episode revealing he was retiring the podcast. Maron regularly hammers the popular comics in the Rogan orbit as the second coming of morning-zoo talk radio or, worse, fascist propagandists.
In his entertainingly prickly new special “Panicked” (HBO Max), Maron quips: “If Hitler was alive today, he’d probably appear on Theo Von’s podcast.”
Maron, 61, is often positioned (including by himself) in opposition to Rogan, 57, but they have a lot in common. Around the same stage in life, they both worked in mainstream pop culture before becoming podcast pioneers. They revere stand-up, are interested in politics and regularly wax poetic about the Boston comedy scene, even name-checking the same artists. When I saw Maron in the 1990s, he had a large interest in conspiracy theories.
Whereas Rogan became increasingly influential by digging into the worlds of Trump-era thinkers, business titans and combat sports, Maron has always been more of an aesthete. He is obsessed with the craft of making art and has a romantic appreciation of intellectual and highbrow cultural life. (It’s hard to imagine the playwright Annie Baker getting invited to “The Joe Rogan Experience.”) This manifests itself in shame about what Maron doesn’t know, as in an offhand remark about not having read the collected works of Alexander Pope.
That kind of guilt, revealing a greater anxiety about becoming philistine than elitist, is rare these days — and I badly miss it.
Maron has always been a powerful venter, but as he has grown older, he has picked up and increasingly leaned on quieter weapons, like wry quips, passive-aggressive insults and clever wordplay. In a bit about caring for his father, who suffers from dementia, he says he prefers the term “newly demented.”
AFTER TAPING THE SPECIAL at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May, he lingered onstage and a fan asked why he talked about his relationship with his father but not his mother. Many artists might brush off such a question, find it rude. But Maron took it as a challenge, offering a quick story about his mother once telling him: “I don’t think I can figure out how to love you.” Then he abruptly moved on.
The exchange was revealing about Maron and the bond he has forged with his audience. Probing tortured relationships with brutal honesty is what we expect from him. And he is happy to deliver.
The new special starts fiery, taking shots at the current Trump administration and, in a knowing aside, his own fan base. “Progressives really have to figure out a way to deal with this buzz-kill problem,” he says, before adopting the tone of someone leveling with a friend. “You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism.”
Then comes a pivot. Grabbing the microphone stand, Maron shifts his voice as if he’s going to try something different, which he describes, wryly, as being entertaining. “People need entertainment,” he says, the implication being that isn’t what he does. Then he shares a shaggy cat tale about grabbing his three felines and making a run for it out of fear that his house would burn in the Los Angeles fires.
It’s a playful yarn that covers a tragic event through an examination of himself and his comical catastrophizing. This is a quintessential Maron move, one he has doubled down on as his career has progressed. It’s one that I suspect his podcast helped him develop.
When I got the job as the comedy columnist for The New York Times, I prepared by talking to people in the industry, reading as many books as I could, attending myriad shows and listening to every episode of Maron’s podcast. Spending time with him was by far the most useful.
It’s not just that the podcast is a superb oral history of the art form. Or that his conversations can be insightful, especially in mapping issues and divides in the field. I especially savor the discussions with less famous peers who share a history (like the recent episode featuring Rich Aronovitch).
The most important thing I learned from Maron’s podcast is the art of interviewing. He’s up there with Terry Gross and Howard Stern at getting famous people to reveal themselves. Maron has two unusual tactics for a celebrity interviewer: going on the attack and becoming wildly introspective — often in the same conversation.
He attacks by introducing a bone to pick to create conflict and seeing how his guest responds. When I went on his show in 2017, he did this by taking issue with a column I wrote on Lenny Bruce. Not only did it force me to think aloud and become more present, it also gave the conversation a shape, injecting dissension that may or may not be resolved. It’s why Maron often ends his podcasts with the phrase that is the title of a new documentary about him: “Are we good?”
The answer is usually yes, though the riveting episodes are when it isn’t (Gallagher) or you aren’t sure (Jerrod Carmichael). Maron is looking for connection, but there’s also a part of these interviews that are just a self-portrait, an aspect that makes me think that when he asks, “Are we good?” he is using the royal “we.”
Maron’s real signature — the core of his legacy — is how he uses examination of his own mind to illuminate other people. This is a risky move that easily becomes indulgent, and Maron can fall victim to that. But he’s fundamentally a curious person who has somehow figured out a way to make his neuroses a window into others.
By being vulnerable, he invites others to do the same. It has made his impending departure from podcasting a sad event for comedy nerds.
BUT MARON IS ALSO ONE OF THE FEW COMICS whose podcasting has made him a better stand-up, precisely because he has integrated this double focus — looking at the outside world through himself — into his specials.
Unlike most podcasters, Maron refused to pivot to video. It’s why when he announced his retirement, my first thought went to a book by another highly respected cerebral comedian.
Fred Allen was a titan of the golden age of radio, and his memoir, “Treadmill to Oblivion,” described how the move to television robbed an essential part of the imaginative work of the listener. He predicted it would ruin comedy. Unlike his rival Jack Benny, Allen never made the transition, and faded from memory. You might see him as a stuck-in-his-ways crank. I don’t.
As we enter yet another technological transition, with every comedian, talk show host and pundit fleeing to YouTube, I think Allen’s consideration of the downside of disruption is more prescient than ever. Of course, the shift from radio to television did not ruin comedy, but that doesn’t mean something precious wasn’t lost. Or that the new world is always better.
Do you have any idea how innovative, talent-rich and brilliant radio comedy was in the 1930s and ’40s? Probably not. And in an earlier, more enlightened era, you would feel a little guilty about that.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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