I can’t say I ever truly understood podcasts. Firstly, I don’t take in information well through auditory means, which is the main reason why lectures leave me impatient and I loathe phone calls. I get that you want something to listen to while you handle the mundane shit of day-to-day life, and that’s fair, and some few podcasts manage to scratch that itch, but now that the market is saturated, and now that random men tell me to listen to someone’s podcast on the regular, I can’t muster the enthusiasm. It just seems like more detritus.
However, that wasn’t always the case. Before all three turned into the worst kind of culture-war slop, and before I stopped listening entirely, This American Life and Radiolab and 99% Invisible were regular favorites. The first balanced beautiful human nuance with hilariously bitchy snark – Sedaris for the win – and the latter two were the best kind of popularization, taking complex and thorny ideas in science and design and presenting them in an informative but still rigorous way. But the early podcast bros never did it for me. Adam Carolla was far funnier when he was bottomfeeding on Comedy Central’s Man Show and lowering the discourse on MTV’s Loveline than he ever was on his own podcast (Dr. Drew telling listeners how important communication was, followed by Carolla asking if they’d done anal yet). And long before his right-wing turn, I found Joe Rogan to just be kinda annoying, even when he was interviewing people I found interesting and admirable.
Yet I’m not sure quite why I stuck with Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast ends this week.
Before every comedian had an interview podcast, Maron had one.
I remember so distinctly when I first listened to him, sometime in 2011 or 2012, while working on a technical writing gig in late summer in suburban Seattle. And while I don’t exactly remember how I found him, I do remember the angry, weird, self-loathing comic style that drew me in. This in particular stands out.
And the podcast had the same spirit. You got to see how he dealt with all the people he’d wronged in the past, making amends with all the people he had been an absolute shit to in the cocaine-and-bourbon haze of the ‘90s NYC alt-comedy world. My team at the time consisted of a cadre of overeducated, boozy quasi-fuckups with humanities degrees, heavily stamped passports, and strong opinions on David Foster Wallace. Listening to Marc Maron as I took screenshots and instructed users on how to get the most out of their Tapout-branded Android devices seemed a natural response to the circumstances in which I’d found myself. We’re all in this shit together. Let’s hash it out.
And while his personality carried the tone of the interviews – the deeply wounded man trying to get good with the world – the guest list largely consisted of other loveable disasters, figuring their shit out with someone else figuring his shit out, as they all admitted they hadn’t behaved like upstanding citizens after snorting absolute alligator tails of primo Colombian. And they still weren’t completely alright. Sure, they had writing credits on well-regarded shows, they had husbands and wives who managed to deal with their foibles, but they were at the end of the day the sort of broken people who have no choice but to put themselves on stage and try to connect. These were their war stories. In a world of slick packaged bullshit, WTF seemed a beacon of honesty.
For years, I listened religiously.
That being said, I did fall off some time ago. As Maron’s fame grew, his guest list consisted of fewer and fewer second-tier comics who never quite made it, and more and more genuine A-listers on the award-season campaign interview circuit. Maybe the famed Obama interview, an ugly sort of softball utterly lacking in substance, was the moment where he jumped the shark, but it seemed to me more of a slow decline. Rather than actually connecting to something deep and human, too many Maron interviews seemed to have the form of sincerity but not the substance, and consequently were little more than kitsch. His penultimate episode, a 40-minute monologue, ended with a compilation of some of his most legendary moments, set to the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” And it just felt manipulative.
He himself also got progressively more annoying. There was less and less cynical smirking counterpointed with genuine tears, and more whinging about the minor humiliations of Hollywood life and getting fat from craft services, as well as a fair bit of ignorant culture-war slop. And while I expected a certain misanthropy from him, it used to be barded with empathy. By now, his opening monologues have devolved into the groanings of a stereotypical wealthy California liberal who seems to genuinely despise and fear ordinary people, someone who seemingly hates them for their stupidity and just desires to wishcast them out of existence, while at the same time mewling about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices and listening to people’s trauma, assuming of course that they serve to assuage his sense of personal virtue. I came awfully close to smashing my phone when he harped about how people elected a fascist because they cared about the price of eggs. God forbid people, even if quite misguidedly, take their material conditions into consideration rather than their moral uprightness. Not all of us get infinite swag bags of vegan snacks, Marc.
Furthermore, as other comics imitated the style of WTF, it seemed less like a unique representative of a certain world and more part of the background chorus. How unique is it when Bill Burr has a comedy podcast, and Conan O’Brien, and Shane Gillis, and Hannibal Buress, and Iliza Shlesinger, and Anthony Jeselnik… and… and I didn’t even know most of those people had comedy podcasts, but all I had to do was go to the Wikipedia pages of some comics I liked, and lo and behold. It’s almost a requirement now.
But even with all of that said, he never fully devolved into shit. He never got the neon podcast sign, he never sliced his interviews up into TikToks with starburst subtitles. For every utterly pointless interview with a focus-grouped favorite, there were interviews with the sorts of weirdos I like hearing from, and at its best it was still a clarion call to those of us, who try, quixotically, to still pursue creative endeavors in this benighted era. Consider this beauty, with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (and go watch Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff while you’re at it).
Yet just as I’m writing this, final episode dropped. It’s Obama, he’s back. Will I even listen? It’s frankly doubtful – I don’t need to spend another second of my life with that empty suit. Just fuck you. But maybe that’s a representative choice of our first-as-tragedy-second-as-farce era, trying to drink the Amanita muscaria urine until the heat death of the universe.
Which is a sign that it really is time for the curtain to fall. I’m not sad to go because of Marc Maron himself, as he is now, who is someone I feel less identification with, or because of his podcast, as it is now, as something that I feel has lost much of its original value, but because of what he and it were to me at one time in my life. Our lives disappear piece by piece, and for every graceful dismount, there are a half-dozen stumbles.
