Jon Stewart and Marc Maron’s attempt to hash out their never ending beef may have been a little more complicated than Maron let on, according to former Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac.
Cenac, who’s been publicly critical of his former boss before, claimed Tuesday on the Inside Late Night podcast that he was the “consigliere” between Stewart and Maron ahead of their one attempt to bury the hatchet—a story Maron has told himself more than once.
“Maron reached out to me to ask me if I could broker a conversation with him and Jon because he wanted to get Jon on [his WTF podcast] so that they could talk about the beef,” Cenac said. “And so then I was the consigliere for Maron and went to Jon and put them in conversation.”
“This is years ago when I’m still on [The Daily Show],” continued Cenac, who worked as a writer on Stewart’s show from 2008 to 2012. “Maron and Jon talk. I hear both of their sides of it. I may be the one person who heard the aftermath from both of them,” he continued. “I hear Jon’s side of it, and Jon was like, ‘I’m not going to do his podcast…he just wants me to do the podcast so that it gets numbers for his podcast. I don’t want to do that.’”
Though Stewart offered to have coffee to hash out the beef privately in lieu of going on Maron’s show, Cenac said Stewart told him, “‘He doesn’t want to grab coffee with me.’”
Cenac added that Maron told him “the exact same thing” about the proposed coffee date. “To me it was like oh s—, you two are the same…I think they both see each other as a threat.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to representatives for Maron and Stewart for comment.
Maron said in July that he’s long considered Stewart his “nemesis” during an appearance on NPR’s Wild Card with Rachel Martin podcast.
“There was a jealousy to it, but it got consuming. But it went on a long time and he knew it. And we’ve had confrontations about it and we are not friends,” Maron said then. Stewart has never addressed the decades-long feud, which Maron said began because they’d both duked it out to become “the king of politics, satire, whatever,” and he felt Stewart was winning.
It was during that same interview that Maron most recently retold the story of the time he’d tried to smooth things over Stewart and talk through their issue on WTF.
Maron said Stewart told him at the time, “‘Hey… I don’t know if you remember, you know, what a d–k you were to me back in the day… there’s no love here, man.’”
Maron previously told Rolling Stone in 2012 of the interaction, “He said, ‘Look, I’ve always thought you were very creative and I’m sure whatever you’re doing is nice, and if you want to have coffee, I might be willing to do that,’” but neither man followed up.
Maron explained to the publication that “pride” was his reason for never calling Stewart back, particularly as he’d felt The Daily Show host’s “nice” comment was “condescending.”
Though Stewart has never acknowledged the conflict, Cenac suggested Tuesday that the host still had some lingering bad blood for Maron.
Cenac appeared on WTF in 2015, where he called out Stewart for telling him to “f— off” for challenging a joke the host told in the writer’s room that the then-Daily Show correspondent felt was racially insensitive. Cenac claimed Stewart was more concerned with the fact Cenac used Maron’s platform to amplify the issue when they finally spoke about the aftermath.
“We discussed it the tiniest bit, but it was really more about him not understanding why I went on Maron’s show to talk about it,” Cenac said Tuesday. “And it was really more about his issues with Maron, and he felt Maron was manipulating me because he and Maron have beef.”
Maron announced over the summer that he’s concluding his WTF podcast in October after 16 years, ending an era after the show pioneered the podcast medium. Stewart has never appeared on WTF — and despite making dozens of late-night appearances with Conan O’Brien, David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and others, Maron has never been a guest on The Daily Show.
Cenac added, “If Marc had gotten The Daily Show, Jon would be a guy with a podcast that turned into this thing…I feel like the reason the beef exists is because they’re so similar.”
The post Epic Marc Maron-Jon Stewart Feud Takes Childish Twist appeared first on The Daily Beast.
