W
ait, Kit, what was that headline again?” Marc Maron is sitting cross-legged on the porch of his house in Glendale, California, calling out to his girlfriend. A muffled voice from just outside the video-call frame says something, and the 62-year-old stand-up cracks up. “‘Marc Maron Pioneers Not Having a Podcast.’ That’s funny.”
Here’s another joke, albeit less ha-ha: Maron spent decades as a comic working venues ranging from laundromats to Largo, as well as doing a brief stint in political talk radio. He felt his career had hit a brick wall. Then a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity: He revolutionized modern media. For the past 16 years, Maron ran his groundbreaking podcast, WTF With Marc Maron, from various home garages around the greater Los Angeles area, chatting with everyone from his comedy-club peers to A-list actors. WTF became appointment listening and a mandatory stop on press tours. He’s largely credited for not just legitimizing the format — see his 2015 episode with then-sitting President Barack Obama — but kick-starting the DIY digital-conversation boom.
Then Maron decided he was done WTF-ing around. He and longtime producer Brendan McDonald announced in June that they would be ending the show. The announcement was met with something close to a national day of mourning. It wasn’t like Maron was retiring: His sixth special, Panicked, dropped in August, and called out everybody from righteous fellow progressives (“We annoyed the average American into fascism”) to Theo Von. A recently released documentary on Maron, Are We Good?, gave a peek behind the neurotic, workaholic curtain. And he’s become a prolific character actor, showing up in everything from the Owen Wilson golf comedy Stick to the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere.
But Maron’s twice-weekly dispatches from his home studio, in which he offered deep conversations and a counterpoint to the ongoing enshittification of both comedy and culture (the left-leaning podcaster has zero love for the “anti-woke” stand-up contingent that’s been co-opted by MAGA), will be a thing of the past. Maron is the only voice of the year who earned the honor by removing his voice from the cacophony that now passes for discourse. The final episode, which once again found the host shooting the shit with Obama, dropped on Oct. 13. “We need hope right now,” he jokes, “so I was like, ‘Can we get the hope guy?’”
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What started as an alternative way of getting his voice out there, unfiltered and unbeholden to the usual talk-show protocols, has turned into an industry, and the saturation of comedians turned podcasters Maron felt were “just lowering the bar for all entertainment every day” signaled it was time to gracefully say goodbye. The final months were still highly personal, with Maron weighing in on his father’s declining health, fretting over his cats, and caustically commenting on the state of the nation. But you could feel an energetic shift. “I think I felt lighter,” he says.
For longtime listeners, the idea that we’d no longer get the chance to hear Maron kvetch and commune with the funny and famous each week has left many bereft. “I feel bad that I’m not going to be there to help them frame things differently, or feel better, or whatever,” Maron notes. “Some guy came up to me last night: ‘My wife fell asleep to you every night.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I have that effect.’”
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But Maron knew it was time, and he’s proud he stuck to his guns. He’s amazed he built a platform where he could vent and the comedy community at large could talk shop. He’s grateful that he had a place to call out the growing wave of comics and fellow podcasters he feels helped get us into the political shit show we’re in now. And he’s glad that even when the medium began rewarding some lowest common denominators with seven-figure contracts, he never turned into, in his own inimitable words, “a greedy whore who will sell themselves out for any sort of quick clickbait, sandbagging clusterfuck.”
“My sense of what an interview is: You have someone who has an agenda to get these things out of a person,” Maron says. “And for me, it was always really just, if we can get this rolling into a conversation, who cares what comes out?”
