The struggling comedian who invented the podcast – for better and worse

Telegraph

2 days ago

In the late summer of 2009, a struggling comedian, actor and radio host sneaked back into the building of his former employer, Air America, and surreptitiously used one of their studios to record an interview with fellow stand-up Jeffrey Ross. It was, said Marc Maron this week, a 'Hail Mary pass', one last shot at keeping his flagging career alive.
It worked. Almost 16 years and 1,648 episodes later, WTF with Marc Maron is coming to an end, with the podcast wrapping up around the time of its anniversary on September 1. Maron's Hail Mary not only revived his career – it invented a genre and sparked the podcasting boom.
WTF is considered to be the 'OG' of long-form interview podcasts (hate long, rambling interview podcasts? Blame Maron) and inadvertently created many of the podcasting tropes we now know all too well – the introspective intro, the hyper-informal interview, the incongruous advertisements read out by the host. Where Serial (which began five years after WTF) created the true-crime podcast genre, WTF drew up the blueprint for the interview podcast.
Adam Buxton, considered to be the UK's podcast godfather, was directly inspired by Maron to begin his own podcast in 2015.. From humble beginnings, WTF has become a cultural phenomenon, reaching 55m listeners a year, winning awards and even interviewing a president, Barack Obama, when that sort of thing was unheard of for a major politician. (Obama made a special visit to Maron's garage in the suburbs of Los Angeles to record the episode.) In 2022, Maron's interview with Robin Williams was chosen to be preserved by the Library of Congress.
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Breaking the news on the podcast to his guest, comedian John Mulaney, on Monday, Maron mused on the beginnings of WTF. 'When this started no one knew what a podcast was. I was coming out of a horrendous divorce, I was wanting to figure out how to continue living my life, but things were not looking good for me. When we started this thing, all we knew was that we'd do it every Monday and Thursday. There was no way to make money. We didn't know how to build an audience.'
With producer Brendan McDonald, he figured it out, and as he said to Mulaney, he has interviewed 'everyone'. Al Gore, Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, Hugh Grant, Keith Richards, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Mavis Staples – what started as a niche concern for US stand-ups became a 'must-do' for all celebrities.
Maron's low ebb in 2009 - the divorce, losing his job, stand-up career failing to hit the heights of his peers – became his greatest gift and the show has become famed (and, for some listeners, feared) for its gargantuan opening monologues, in which Maron will riff on whatever is in his head. This scrappy, confrontational, neurotic, angry, worn-out, misanthropic Jewish comedian found himself unloading all his problems, including his drug and alcohol addictions, to the listener. His honesty was not just bracing, it was inspiring. His listeners bonded with him. 'I think the first hundred episodes are me asking celebrities to come over and help me with my problems,' he said. Crucially, this defenceless approach caused his interviewees to open up.
The show threw out the traditional conventions of the interview. Maron does little or no research into his guests, rarely plans any questions in advance and talks as much as, and sometimes more than his guests. 'I just want to have conversations,' he has said. Refreshingly, Maron never flatters his guests and, at times, is openly hostile towards them (the show features a lot of score-settling from the world of US stand-up comedy).
Part of the charm is Maron's determinedly lo-fi set-up – after using and abusing his Air America door-pass for the first few episodes, the podcast recording moved to a desk in Maron's garage in Los Angeles, where it remains to this day. Maron has the knack to completely disarm his interviewees. 'People who come into his garage feel like they can unburden themselves,' McDonald once said.
Recording twice a week, every week, for 16 years (Maron has never taken time off and even records when he is touring or on holiday) means that every wrinkle of Maron's life is documented in WTF. In 2015, he interviewed the director Lynn Shelton (and again in 2018), who he would later begin a relationship with. Shelton died aged 54 from leukemia in 2020 – she had only been ill for one week. In true Maron fashion, he kept podcasting, and kept talking.
Speaking to Mulaney, Maron wasn't shy about taking credit for his seminal contribution to podcasting, but he also recognised the negative side. 'I partly feel like I've done an amazing thing for the culture,' he said, 'but I also partly feel like I've released the Kraken.' The Kraken being the mind-boggling saturation of podcasting, with seemingly every minor celebrity having their own warts-and-all podcast.
Maron can also take some of the credit/blame for Maga favourite Joe Rogan, whose own podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, began a few months after Maron's. Rogan's podcast is now the most popular in the US. (Rogan was a guest on WTF in 2011 – they didn't get along too well.)
WTF's listening figures have waned in recent years, with the show rarely troubling the podcast charts (as pointed out by Rogan), but the show still attracts the biggest stars – David Cronenberg, Ryan Coogler, Ariana Grande, Demi Moore, Erin Brockovich, Mike Leigh and Adrien Brody have all been on this year. The show's farewell tour will surely feature some impressive names (a return for Obama perhaps?), with Maron hinting this week that it might finally tempt some who have previously turned the podcast down.
Many listeners will be bereft, but Maron is philosophical. 'It's OK for things to end,' he said in his intro this week. 'This began when there were no podcasts – and now there is nothing but podcasts. We had a great run. It's just time, folks.'
The five best episodes of WTF with Marc Maron
1. Robin Williams (episode 67, 2010
Notable because, four years before his death, the actor talks openly about suicide, but there is so much more to the conversation than that. You get every side of Williams here - manic, hilarious, crude, sad, defeated, upbeat. A remarkable interview.
2. Louis CK (Episodes 111 & 1112, 2010)
Maron's willingness to haul his private life onto the podcast was perhaps best seen in this double-episode with CK, in which the two comedians reveal they used to be close friends but had fallen out. And then, slowly, across the podcast, the old pals find each other again. Slightly tainted, of course, by the recent allegations against CK.
3. Gallagher (episode 145, 2011)
Not everyone will be familiar with the watermelon-smashing cult US comedian, but he was a legend on the American comedy scene. Maron, however, opens up a discussion about Gallagher's frequently homophobic and racist material. Following some robust conversation, Gallagher storms out – Maron's first and only walkout.
4. Barack Obama (episode 613, 2015)
The interview that put rocket fuel in the whole medium of podcasting, with the sitting US president willing to tackle everything from the Charleston massacre and gun laws to race relations in America and his own legacy. His use of the n-word made headlines.
5. Eve Ensler (episode 1028, 2019)
An extraordinary, difficult conversation with Eve Ensler (writer of The Vagina Monologue) about her recent book The Apology, which tackled the violence and sexual abuse she was subjected to by her own father. At one point both interviewee and interviewer are in tears, unable to talk.