Comedian looking to deal with an open wound
Podcast and TV star aiming to translate his own musings into well-crafted comic bits
Marc Maron says he’s not sure if that bar stool onstage — as much a part of every standup comedian’s tool box as the water jug that sits on it — will figure into his performances at the Bluma Appel Theatre this Sunday.
Maybe he’ll sit for parts of his routine, as he has for many of his 25-plus years playing comedy clubs and did in his recent Netflix special, Thinky Pain. Maybe he won’t. On the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Maron wonders how the larger venues on his first theatre tour will mesh with his style, which is more quiet and charmingly acerbic than animated and shouting-inyour-face angry.
“I don’t know when it happened,” he says about what he jokingly refers to as “the evolution of the chair.”
“I used to do it when I was doing badly onstage. It would counteract the feeling I was having (of not doing well). I like the power of it.”
Still, bet on Maron to sit on that stool at some point during his performance. Here’s why. Maron’s act — and by extension, his meandering but riveting soliloquies, which open each of his hugely popular WTF podcast episodes — reminds you of that stranger who sits next to you on a bus and pours their heart out.
Maron, however, translates his personal musings and angst — from two divorces, self-centred parents and career frustrations, to how he’d carry out auto-erotic asphyxiation — into well-crafted, smoothly performed, extremely funny comic bits.
“(The stage) is my primary place of working stuff out,” says Maron, who started in standup with Louis C.K., whom he remains close friends with. “And in different phases of my career, it’s made people very uncomfortable.”
In the year and a half since he last performed in Toronto, Maron, 51, has been working through a lot of new “stuff.” The fiancée he beamed about back then is long gone.
“I’m OK,” he says, still clearly stinging. “That’s a hard situation. Pretty sad and it got pretty ugly. I’m a little bruised up, man.”
Later, there was a relationship with Moon Zappa, a smart, ambitious woman closer to his age bracket (his ex-fiancée is 20 years his junior), whom he coveted for decades. As he offered his legion of podcast fans a sort of play-by-play of the early stages of that romance, one could almost hear them cheering him on . . . then sighing heavily when that, too, ended.
“Yeah, dude. No one was more disappointed than me,” he says about that breakup, which he describes as “painful and difficult.
“(We) are both very emotionally challenging people. There was no way for me to know the reality of the situation until I got in it. We both tried as hard as we could . . . but the emotional chaos and needs were a bit hard to manage.”
While they’re not enemies, neither are they friends. “I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be. I was just in over my head, buddy.”
The stakes are a bit higher now for Maron when he plunks down all this baggage for comic relief: via his podcast, his scripted TV show in its third season on IFC or his standup. “I’m a little more diplomatic,” says the comic, who’s now dating an artist. “I certainly don’t use too many names onstage.”
While we may not always know exactly who inspired his freshest torment and anger, the basis of an act that’s not so much an open book as it is an open wound, Maron assures that he’ll remain true to his approach.
“I can’t change the way I perform, really. I do what I do. I just want it to be engaging and funny.” While standing or seated, of course. Marc Maron’s Maronation Tour comes to the Bluma Appel Theatre Sunday, for two shows at 7:30 p.m. (sold out) and 10 p.m. Denis Grignon is a standup comic and writer.