Boomer Lives!
The Weekly Lately #056
For years now I’ve had a strange thought about Marc Maron. I’ve thought, “I should really write something about how much his podcast means to me, so that if he dies, I can post it.” Fortunately Maron lives, but it tells you something about the guy that an avid listener like me thought he’d probably die before ending it. I was wrong. He’s ending it. I was looking forward to old old Marc, I’m talking 80+, podcasting from the nursing home about his new obsession with watches or boots or a newfound appreciation for Leslie Nielsen (I can hear his voice: “one of the great clowns.”)
I’ve been a WTFer (WTFBuddy, WTF-a-tarian, etc) since episode three or four, back in the early days where he’d have a real guest, a character guest and various other bits, remnants from his radio-show days at Air America. But the monologue was always there, and that was the good stuff: Marc lamenting a weird look Patton Oswalt gave him in 1994, or how he couldn’t get his $500 jeans to fit perfectly even after sitting in the bathtub wearing them, or how the lentils he had at home weren’t the right kind.
Boom! I just shit my pants.
Longtime listeners will be familiar with some of the Maron eras: the jeans in the bathtub, changing the locks to his house when a girlfriend moved out, the more recent fridge repair saga, Boomer’s still-unsolved disappearance, the interview with the comic who talked about trying to cut his own head off in a hotel room (sorry, or maybe not sorry, I forgot who that was). Hell, I was listening to the Gallagher episode the day it dropped. And then there are the personal relationships, at first a larger part of the show but (probably wisely) becoming something he was more careful about discussing, up to the unfortunate passing of his girlfriend, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, in 2020.
I could go on and on. Oh, and the Louie interviews, before…well, you know. The Carlos Mencia interview…and the calling-bullshit-follow up! Of course, Marc talking with Obama was great too – I remember him basically asking, “Well, fundamentally, there’s only so much the government will cede to help poor people, right?” It’s kind of the only question that matters to me – I think it is central to everything wrong with our politics, and it is rarely asked so bluntly – and Marc’s ability to drill down to something like that speaks to his perceptive strengths as an interviewer, even if the then-President nimbly skirted the issue.
And then there’s the inarguably Maron language: “certain disposition” “who are your guys?”, etc. Like any person you’ve known (parasocially, I admit) for years and years, you start to see the themes, the repetitions, the holes your friend keeps falling into. Maron has those, for sure, but I never held it against him. You try talking into a mic twice a week for nearly two decades without revealing/repeating yourself. And repeat himself he did - I could tell his Sam Kinison stories from start to finish like an ancient Greek orator telling The Odyssey from memory: “Tell me, oh Muse, of the man who was a doorman at the Comedy Store before he lost his mind on cocaine and fled…”.
In fact, that vulnerable yet critical self-mythologizing was sort of the entire point of the show writ large. I could never agree with folks who skipped his monologues. Sure, casual fans listened to an episode here or there because of the guest – “Oh shit, Keith Richards!?”, but real ones listened because of Marc, a comedian from New Mexico – no, New Jersey, well, he had family in Pompton Lakes, everyone knows that, and his grandfather’s hardware store, of course… – no, Boston, where he washed dishes and was humbled, or is it Queens, with the original cat trio….or LA? Which time in LA?” Ah, and San Francisco, of course, which leads me to the Robin Williams interview, which I think is now in the Library of Congress. For good reason.
I remember in the early days rooting for his success as the names of guests grew bigger and bigger. By the end, especially after he had Obama on, it wasn’t a question of if but when – Lorne happened, after all, and Springsteen, and Tina Fey, and….who’s left? Xi Jinping? These days I half expect Amelia Earhart to saunter into the studio aged 127, jabber for fifteen minutes about the terrible trouble she had finding the place and then ask, “Oh are we recording?” For the final time: YES, YOU ARE RECORDING. THIS IS THE SHOW.
It’s a question of personal taste, but for me, the remaining White Whales (in this metaphor there are more than one…think Moby Dicks, the sequel, also this metaphor doubly works because the following are literally just three old white guys, sorry) are easy to list: Jon Stewart (please), Jonathan Richman (personal request, someone who worked with him told me via email he wasn’t doing podcasts, but Marc has apparently asked) and Adam Sandler (I was a kid in the 90s). Oh, and maybe Donald Trump, because I think if anyone could mine some scrap of interest below the narcissism, it’s a guy who has done it professionally and personally for decades: Marc fuckin’ Maron.
What else can I say? He’s one of my guys.
*Read his Vulture interview where he talks about how hack the anti-woke shit is. He was one of the first to call it out, and I think he’s right.
“I’m just saying that they [anti-woke comics] are hacks, and it’s an angle. That’s really the big unsaid thing, is that anti-woke is the new hack. You’ve got like-minded people who fill these rooms because they don’t know how to assess funny unless it’s bullying, or unless it’s in totally bad taste. There’s no nuance to it. A lot of people who are not innately that funny become comics, and they can become good comics if they can figure it out. But this is just an excuse to ride the momentum of an audience that’s been built on these premises. For a bunch of freethinkers, they all think the same thing, and it’s like three things that they poke at, and it’s hackneyed. They are the hacks, and they are the groupthink victims. It’s really kind of profound.”
Thanks for reading.
-Max