On a drive to lunch one sunny recent afternoon in Glendale, Calif., the comedian and actor Marc Maron was contemplating the term “burnout,” trying it on and inspecting it from different angles, like a new pair of pants he wasn’t sure were to his taste.
Maron had used the word a few times in a June episode of his podcast, “WTF With Marc Maron,” in which he announced that he and his founding producer, Brendan McDonald, would be ending the influential show after 16 years. Many responses to the news had echoed the term (including Howard Stern’s “I was burned out in 1996 “) and now Maron seemed to worry that he’d sounded weak, or self-aggrandizing.
“The fact is, we’ve been doing this a long time,” he said, turning the wheel of his tan Toyota Avalon, a graveyard of empty seltzer cans, coffee cups, and Zyn packets. “And now we kind of want to live our lives. That may be burnout, or it may just be the natural course of things.”
This cycle of conjecture and revision — Maron grasping for, and occasionally reaching, some kind of emotional truth — was the essence of “WTF.” Over more than 1,600 episodes, he engaged in raw and personal dialogues with a staggering array of comedians, artists and public figures. Among them were Robin Williams, Lorne Michaels, Louis C.K. and Barack Obama, who became the first sitting president to appear on a podcast when he was a guest in 2015.
Yet some of the show’s indelible moments came from Maron himself. In discursive audio diaries that opened each episode, he exorcised a lifetime of petty and profound demons — including troubles with home repairs, sobriety, cat ownership, anxiety and the sudden death five years ago of his partner, the director Lynn Shelton — long before they could be metabolized into stand-up material.
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The post Marc Maron on the End of His Landmark Podcast appeared first on New York Times.
