Angst fuels Marc Maron’s career revival
Marc Maron is hardly the first comedian to work out his personal issues in front of an audience. But when it comes to angst and insecurity, he makes Woody Allen sound as cocksure as a young William Shatner.
In the first episode of his sitcom “Maron,” the veteran stand-up’s barely fictionalized alter ego becomes obsessed with an Internet troll making fun of him on Twitter. So he tracks the culprit down and confronts him at a Dun- But he still finds time to perform onstage, including a gig Thursday, June 6, at Stand Up Live in Phoenix.
“Feeling better about myself has really helped my stand-up a great deal,” he says. “I take more responsibility for my bits in terms of really working them out and polishing them down.”
Maron’s turnaround had an unlikely catalyst, a podcast titled “WTF With Marc Maron” that he started in 2009. He had recently been fired from his job as a radio talker for the liberal Air America network and began recording a series of interviews with other comedians, including Patton Oswalt, Margaret Cho and Dane Cook.
The conversations were informal and sometimes surprisingly candid. In one memorable episode from 2010, Maron and Louis C.K. openly discussed their strained friendship, which C.K. believed had fallen apart because Maron was jealous of his success.
“When I started that, I was not in good shape, in an emotional way, on a career level, on a financial level,” Maron says. “Things were bad. And I think the act of talking to my peers was a way of learning how to get out of the darkness, get out of the bitterness, learning how to listen and learning how to laugh again. That changed my world, changed my art, changed my career.”
In “Attempting Normal,” Maron chronicles his journey out of a darkness that included an ugly divorce and drug problems. All of this also is fodder for his new sitcom, although he and his co-writers feel free to make up stories if they fit the tone of Maron’s humor.
“Some have bits and pieces of the truth in them, and some are really close to my life,” he says.
Although the New Jersey-born Maron, 49, has devoted half his life to comedy, he says there was never a singular moment in his youth when he decided that was what he wanted to do. But he grew up admiring such pioneering comedians as George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Woody Allen.
“I just saw them as guys who had a point of view. They had an angle on things,” he says. “These guys spoke their truth, whatever that was. I thought that was an amazing ability. Stand-up to me was a ballsy thing to do.”
Maron’s own brand of confessional comedy — “probably overly candid” — continues that tradition. But his idea of what it means to speak his truth continues to evolve. For example, he has given up on the kind of political polemics he practiced on the radio.
“Most people who blabber on about politics, that’s all they do. And I was also avoiding my own issues by doing that,” he says.
“I realized that a lot of my anger was not founded in my feelings about politics and justice. It ran a little deeper than that. I realized that if you’re an angry person, you can use any template to get that anger out.
“It’s your responsibility to deal with those core issues.”