The Culture Changed. Marc Maron Stayed the Same.

The Atlantic

7 days ago

Back in the 1990s, when Marc Maron began appearing on Late Night With Conan O'Brien as a panel guest, the comedian would often alienate the crowd. Like most of America at the time, O'Brien's audience was unfamiliar with Maron's confrontational brand of comedy and his assertive, opinionated energy. (In 1995, the same year he taped an episode of the HBO Comedy Half-Hour stand-up series, Maron was described as 'so candid that a lot of people on the business side of comedy think he's a jerk' in a New York magazine profile of the alt-comedy scene.) But through sheer will, he would eventually win them back. 'You always did this thing where you would dig yourself into a hole and then come out of it and shoot out of it like this geyser,' O'Brien recently told Maron. 'It was a roller-coaster ride in the classic sense.'
Maron, though, was rarely attempting to sour the room. 'I went out there wanting that first joke to work every time! It just did not,' he told O'Brien. Even when he eventually achieved some mainstream success through his long-running podcast, WTF With Marc Maron, Maron's comedy remained an acquired taste, equal parts cantankerous and ruminative. Still, he reached that success by maintaining his creative voice, not by compromising it. It's an approach partially born out of necessity, he acknowledges in Panicked, his new HBO Max special: 'I don't know if all I'm doing is mining for gold in a river of panic.'
Panicked is the third special from Maron this decade, following 2020's End Times Fun and 2023's From Bleak to Dark. In this loose trilogy, the comedian contends with catastrophic current events—climate emergencies, COVID, the gradual rise of authoritarianism—while addressing difficulties in his personal life. These specials feature Maron at his most controlled: He delivers long-form cinematic narratives while dipping into character work (affecting voices, embodying personas) and experimenting with physical comedy.
One recurring subject in Panicked is, for lack of a better term, all varieties of shittiness: Maron talks about his cat Charlie's diarrhea troubles and the discovery of rat feces in his crawl space, which eventually prompts an existential spiral about why his home has seemingly become a rest-stop bathroom for the neighborhood rodents. The theme—this feeling of being surrounded by the muck—extends beyond the purely domestic. As he sees it, America has declined under fascistic leadership; democracy itself has nose-dived in part because of comedians who are overly obsessed with censorship; Maron's father's mind is slowly decaying because of his dementia. In one digression, Maron muses about various possibilities for his own corpse once he dies: a cemetery burial where no one will visit him; a cremation where his ashes will be possibly mixed into his cat's food; an environmentally friendly burial in a forest that will one day be developed into housing.
Some of these seem like terrible options for the afterlife, frankly—and while this riffing is funny, it's also unavoidably dark. 'I don't think that I ever got into this to be entertaining,' Maron tells his audience. It's an instructive, revealing sentiment he's conveyed many times before, especially on WTF, which he recently announced will end this fall. Even when Maron was a younger, more aggressive comic, his jokes were always a vehicle for recursive self-reflection. He held people's attention by exposing his psyche and excavating humor from the act of emotional vulnerability.
At the same time, Maron's work has never been about personal confession for its own sake. Consider a lengthy bit from Panicked during which he recalls sexual trauma he may have experienced as a child. When Maron and his brother were younger, he explains, they had an older male babysitter who asked them to sexually service him. Maron isn't certain whether he complied (though he admits that it's distinctly possible), but he proceeds to itemize other childhood traumas, such as being shamed for his weight by his mother, that he considers 'much worse than blowing the babysitter.'
Maron begins the bit by insisting that he's processed the experience; the story isn't meant to solicit pity or serve as the basis for a TED Talk–like speech about how to overcome hardship. Instead, it's a springboard to explore how people in his orbit worked through the abuse that they've inflicted on others. He digs into what he describes as his mother's neglectful parenting; he reimagines his old babysitter as a current-day 'anti-woke' comedian who brags about his sadistic exploits. Anguish is redirected into forceful speculation, all without sacrificing the laughs.
Since WTF premiered in 2009, Maron's temperament has certainly softened. But his perspective, and the way he manages his emotions, have remained remarkably consistent from the jump. Consider the gap in personal circumstance between Panicked and 2009's Final Engagement, his third comedy album and some of the most bitter stand-up I've ever heard. Though Final Engagement was recorded at a personal low and Panicked arguably at a professional peak, he's recognizably the same person in both works. His subjects and their contexts may change, but Maron's style—his cheeky and dyspeptic delivery, his wound-up body language, the way he can use a stool as rhetorical punctuation—has been constant, a sign not of stagnation but of truth.
While it's possible to divide Maron's career into phases—not famous and then sort-of famous, grumpy and less grumpy—it's better to view his body of work as a continuum. In End Times Fun, he directed outrage toward the normalization of California's worsening wildfire seasons; by Panicked, the normalization has set in, and he tells a story about needlessly evacuating his home during the fires that swept through Southern California earlier this year. Similarly, the rage he expressed in his following album, 2006's Tickets Still Available, about George W. Bush using the potential capture of Osama bin Laden as an electoral strategy, is not dissimilar from his incredulous anger in Panicked regarding voters eager to say retarded without reprisal.
If Maron's perspective has changed, it's in relation to evolving cultural norms. In Panicked, Maron describes his phone as his 'primary emotional partner' with sarcastic resignation, a stance that amasses some historical weight given that, in 2002, he closed his first album by mocking the frenzied dread of a person who had forgotten their cellphone. He's also surrendered some ground on his long-standing discomfort with psychiatric medication now that he takes an anti-anxiety pill. ('Just to report in, it's not working,' he deadpans.) But personal growth is neither a straight line nor a total transformation; sometimes it happens by remaining present and real in a world that offers little solid footing. The pleasure of Maron's stand-up is witnessing him use his voice to continually revise thoughts amidst shifting winds—not a conventional sort of entertainment, but a style that still counts for something.