marc maron
written by Ken Carlson
(Nov/Dec 07)
“I’m fine with funny. I don’t know how to be too mundane, but I don’t have a problem with that. There are comics I like, entertainers, who want to say something. I don’t want to be up there soap boxing. I’m just trying to be as honest as I can. I’ve gone out of my way not to talk down to anybody because I don’t want to be that guy. I’ve just gotten to the point that they can either laugh with me or at me. I don’t care. If they laugh at me because I’m crazy, fine. If they laugh with me because they identify with me, fine. Either way it’s OK. I don’t have a problem with just telling jokes. I wish I could do that. I’ve always wished I could, but I can’t. It’s not satisfying. You’ve go to get out there and take some emotional risks in front of people you don’t know.” 
Marc Maron. Ranting liberal. Charismatic curmudgeon. Clever and challenging. Hippy pundit. Lives in a house with four cats. So, he’s not the easiest to pinpoint. While his sharp smart style of satire is needed now more than ever, it seems almost a lost art. Besides his tour, he’s developing a potential HBO series and working on a new CD. I sat down with him recently after his set at Comix.
“It was in Australia in 1994. It was so bad I was sent home from the country. I was brought out to headline for a month. At that time I really didn’t have the material to headline, but I said yes so I could get out of the country and make the money. After a week of progressively diminishing sets, with the guy telling me I couldn’t do certain bits. I was down to about 35 minutes. It just kept getting worse and worse. My nerves were beginning to rattle. Then, the first big show, the Saturday night, there were about 400 people there. I got on that stage. All I could hear for forty five minutes was the sound of the embers burning on my cigarette. I got off and the guy said it wasn’t working out. He paid me for three weeks and called it a deal.”
“It took a long time to get over it. I was ready to quit. Of course I kind of felt like that tonight too. So I guess it’s relatively constant.”
“When I started doing comedy, I just did comedy clubs. There were a few college events and the odd open mic. The sets were OK. I had five minutes of jokes. A strong opener. A pretty strong closer. It was pretty terrifying. I mean, how could you get up and talk about stuff for five or six minutes? The worst part was waiting to go on. You always had these situations where you could be an established comic but a bartender would dictate who goes up. A lot of the times I found that some of these guys, bookers on open mic nights, would torture us, depending on what they thought we could bear. There was a guy up in Boston at Catch a Rising Star. He’d put the list out, this was back when it included me & (David) Cross, Louis (CK) & Janeane (Garofalo). You might start at #6 of 20. What he’d do is come out of his office, and move you down to #8. We’d look at each other thinking, what the fuck? The show would progress, he’d come out again, watch a little of the show, then move you to the last in line.”
His performance on this evening has a conversational style, highly personal, seeming to stem from his stream of consciousness. As I waited to enter the club, a woman who probably double parked her Volvo when she came in from Cambridge, pushed to the head of the line because she came to see “the Marc guy from the radio.” If she or the rest of the 3/4 full house was disappointed he didn’t replay tapes from his days on Air America, they didn’t show it. It appeared to be a continuation of his last Comedy Central special. The girlfriend then is the ex-wife now. There were things in life bothering him then, there were new things now. We’re all doomed, I’m going back to bed.
“That’s usually how I am in general. That’s just how I do it. All the jokes are part of an ongoing dialogue I have. There are some I’ll drop in, and some I won’t. There are parts, that if you just say them enough, they become bits, but that’s how I write. Whatever you saw tonight, some will be repeated. I threw some new stuff in, along with the older stuff. I just moved these dialogues around. That’s how I work. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but I have the shit. So, there is some spontaneity.”
“Tonight’s was pretty personal. I accumulated a bunch of people when I hosted my radio show, a political talk show on Air America; it was a comedy show with a lot of people working on it. I helped a lot of people through hard times. A lot of people were freaked out after the 2004 election, a lot of people were feeling marginalized. I made them feel a little better. I used to think, all they ever expect is politics. But, I’m not inherently a political comic. I think people like the fact that I am honest.”
“What Marc does that is so refreshing to watch is that he assumes the audience is intelligent, and then goes on to challenge them from there. Marc won’t dumb anything down for anybody. He’s like Bill Maher that way. Or early 60’s-era Mort Sahl if you want to dig a little deeper. It’s actually the only kind of stand-up I can objectively enjoy.
– Dana Gould, comedian
“When I started, there was just comedy clubs. You waited around to get on stage, night after night. You paid your dues and climbed up the hierarchy to get paid work. Alternative comedy rooms were just providing comics different direction that the mainstream comedy clubs could not accommodate so they could work their shit out. Initially, the criticism was they weren’t getting paid. They weren’t doing this or that. It was the old guard that thought that way. You know what? Ultimately, people did break out of it. So, it turned out to be a lie. My initial reaction was, that the guys who started out in LA – Dana Gould, Janeane Garofalo – these were not freaks or amateurs. Dana’s the most proficient comic you can watch. Same for Janeane. So, to me, alternative was just another venue. The business was saying that clubs were threatened by it because they thought it was diminishing their return. It just provided an outlet for a lot of people who wanted to get on stage. They still do.”
“Comics produce shows with comics in the audience. It doesn’t hurt anybody. And you get Zach Galifianakis, Demetri Martin, Eugene Mirman, Azis Ansari. That’s the thing I don’t like. Everybody’s a comic once they get paid. Alternative comedy was a place to work and try new shit. There is no ‘this guy’s alternative, that guy’s not’. You get paid, you’re a comic. It’s all niche marketing anyway.”
“I have a very personal fan base. When you do radio for a while, they really know you. They almost indulge your comedy because they just like seeing you. When you do radio like I did, very personally, you get people who come up to you on the street asking, ‘Did you get your toilet fixed? I heard you talking about it.’ They have a relationship with you. So, out of respect, I go out and talk to them.”
“I expected to be more popular. You don’t know how it’s going to happen or when. You have to have a certain amount of acceptance. I do what I do. I can’t do anything other than that. What else am I going to do? I’ve never been more creative or performed better than now. It’s not really disappointment, just a little frustrating. I thought I’d have a little more security in my following.”
“I had to stop rationalizing being defensive as having a purpose. I used to be a lot more angry – felt I was the one who would tell it like it is. I realized a lot of that was fear-based bullshit. It was shocking and political. I thought I had some satirical points to make. I had a sort of arrogance to myself that I think diminished after a while when I had that breakthrough. You get paid to have people laugh with you and at you. That’s part of your job as a clown. So, don’t deny the crowd that experience because you want them to understand it in a certain way.”
For most comedians, it appears that they treat the crowd as a single entity. The good ones, like Marc, find a way to relate to them individually. I asked him what he thought his crowd got out of the experience. “I have no fuckin’ idea. It has to be sort of draining and relieving. It’s funny, sad, the full arc.”
“I make it interesting. No matter how the performance goes, it will be memorable. You can’t fake memories.”
“I’m not as organized as Carlin. He’s very scripted. Very technical. There’s not a wasted word with Carlin. I don’t think Carlin improvises at all. He’s very deliberate. In the sense that I’m speaking thematically about things, I think stylistically we’re different.”
“My influences are more along the lines of Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, some of the older jews. I’m fairly careful not to pay too much attention to anyone that influences me. You don’t want to get polluted by their voice. You want to keep your distance.”
“It’s interesting that some people have a certain amount of self awareness. A lot of people are ambitious, so they lie. Part of that is the belief that to entertain you have to lie. You have to protect yourself. There are a lot of frauds out there. If that’s how you want to get ahead, fine. Pat (Cooper – a veteran comic with decades in the business) was interesting recently when he discussed other comics, ‘I’m not a star. I’m a name.’ That’s interesting to be that self aware. I work and people know who I am, but I’m not a star.”
“Those guys at The Comedy Store were rare, and there were only a handful of them. Many of those guys had established themselves in the old Vegas world. Those newcomers who complain now haven’t figured out how to make it in comedy because it’s a rare thing to be a comedy star. It takes a certain amount of diligence. I’ve been on TV a lot. I’m not a huge draw. I’ve built it, but they may not come. You can’t make it happen. When these guys started, because it was such a small world, they were ‘the guys’. Nowadays, with young comics, I don’t know what they expect. You have to look at the options afforded to comics. If you do stand-up, what can you do? Host a show, try to be a comedy star, open for a comedy star, be a writer, write for functions or webisodes. Guys I know who were smart enough to get out and write for comedy shows are having a more comfortable life than I am.”
“After a show I don’t feel that drained. The way I perform, I offer that up. You take some risks. Then you take them over and over again until it settles in. It becomes something you can rely on. More than anything else, I don’t know if I feel better.”
“I’m not a guy who doesn’t believe there are bad audiences. I just do. You can’t really account for everything. Sometimes the connection’s there. Sometimes it’s almost there. Maybe they don’t get it. It’s a mixture of things. I know if I’m too cocky or defensive before I go on stage, it’ll be pretty bad. If I go out there, I have to be open, relatively open. I can’t go out there angry and scare them right off the bat.”
“I used to do this all the time: I’d make sure I had a solid opening joke that I knew would work. I’d kick the door open and try to stay in. But, you can’t rely on that. Now, I let them see who I am, maybe dick around a little, instead of using this trick – ARRGH! they go Yay, then wonder if they really like me. It’s a mixture of things, but I find that if you’re grounded out there, it’s more than just riding one joke. There’s no accounting for it.”
“Something changed a couple of years ago, where I stopped caring whether they laughed at me or with me. A lot of what our job, forever how long it takes, is acting like you’re not scared. I don’t know how to do auto-pilot. A lot of the times you see some guys die up there, ‘cause they don’t change their shit. If it’s not working and you go on auto-pilot, you only get out of it what you put in. I won’t do that. I’ll get angry at the audience. For me, if it’s going badly, that’s when I sit down and make it even more uncomfortable.”
“I think most people’s lives are full of habits and patterns that are not real. They just accept it. If I can create the real thing, instead of some show, it seems more exciting.”
“If you’re changing topics, maybe doing more political stuff, I don’t know if that’s honest. A lot of people don’t know how to do that. (Greg) Giraldo I think came into his own and found what he wanted to do. He’s a pretty smart guy. He’s a fuckin’ lawyer for Christ’ sake. A lot of guys when they start doing well, feel that they’re not really showing their intelligence. Comics are not stupid guys. Some are hiding out there. It becomes a matter of honoring your intellect, more than honesty. You’re challenging yourself to do different things.”
For more info on Marc and his upcoming shows, visit MarcMaron.com.