POSTED: Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 2:00 PM
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| Marc Maron plays Helium tonight through Saturday. |
Wait till these aliens land, because they've got some stand-ups in outer space that no one knows that are fucking geniuses. Very hard to understand, 'cause their references are all outer space references. But I'm looking forward to them coming down soon.
The iTunes store is lousy with comedy podcasts. Most of them are free, some of them are funny and more than a few of them concern themselves with The Life Of The Stand-Up Comic. But none of them dig deeper more often than comedy veteran Marc Maron's
WTF. A biweekly show that started in 2009,
WTF has a strange countercultural vibe, opening with the host rifling through a laundry list of grievances and observations barely connected, but always knotted up nicely at the end. Then comes the interview, usually just him and some other comic sitting across from each other in his garage. The conversation is always driven by Maron's caffeinated curiosity. The man makes no bones about his ego and neuroses when it comes to stand-up, but as an interviewer he's actually pretty generous in sharing the mic with his guests. He's had lots of big names on the show — Robin Williams, Ben Stiller, Eugene Mirman, Janeane Garofalo, Maria Bamford, Paul Scheer — and a ton of up-and-comers, but his two-parter with Carlos Mencia in May of 2010 is probably
WTF's signature moment so far. Mencia, of course, is not popular among his fellow comics and is often accused of joke-stealing. Non-confrontational but journalistically persistent, Maron pins him down in an uncomfortable, mesmerizing interview that had the comedy world buzzing for a while. Mostly, though,
WTF walks the funny/interesting line, just two people shooting the shit. Tonight Maron starts a four-night run at Helium. When I got him on the phone, he'd just finished recording the intro for his interview with Scott Carter, executive producer of
Real Time with Bill Maher, and was just about to take his vitamins. Lots of them.
City Paper: What vitamins are they?
Marc Maron: You don't even want to know. My dad is a vitamin freak, and I fought it for as long as I could and now he's got me on it. I take so many. I take three handfuls. The thing about vitamins is you have no idea if they work but once you start taking them you feel like something horrible is going to happen to you if you don't. it's sort of like religion, you know?
CP: Is it an immediate affect, or a cumulative thing?
MM: I don't know if I feel any affect whatsoever. But I don't feel bad. I mean, I do have a little cold right now so they didn't stop that so what good are they? Maybe they're doing something.
CP: How do you feel about homeopathy?
MM: I don't know. It doesn't seem to work. Doesn't seem to have much of a kick. I mean I'll do it, but it always seems like candy to me. I don't know. Sometimes you can beat the cold. Sometimes you can't.
CP: So you've been doing two podcasts a week for a year and a half. That's nuts.
MM: It's my job. But it's also a great pleasure to get to hang out with people. It's not very often you get to talk to people. It definitely takes a lot out of me, but it's been well received and people dig it so I keep going. We're figuring out a way to make money off it.
I'm really just going for a conversation. I don't really have a plan. I don't do a lot of research. If I can get people to do an authentic conversation where we lose kinda ourselves in it then that's all I'm really looking for. And we can go as deep as we can go. If it feels like it's gonna go deep, we'll go deep. If not, we won't.
CP: Sometimes it seems like you're a shrink for your guests.
MM: I've always felt that — being in this brotherhood of gypsies and rejects for as long as I have — we're all pretty candid and we're pretty free to express ourselves however we want to express ourselves. All of us have spent a lot of time thinking, one way or the other, because we have more time that most people, because of our profession. I just find that a lot of comics are pretty philosophical and have a lot to say about a lot of things. They're relatively willing to talk about stuff in a really deep way.
CP: It's not much insider baseball talk.
MM: No, it's human shit.
CP: People don't come on and just do their acts.
MM: Never, really. And if they do, they usually paraphrase it. I guess it has something to do with me. I'm a pretty open wound myself. If I share a little bit about me, and listen, then people share a little bit about themselves. It's very emotionally rewarding for me to talk to people and to do it twice a week, or more. Gets me out of my own head. And we all work through a bunch of stuff, you know: people on the show, me, people listening. It's good. It's a good thing to do in life.
CP: Do you feel like you're the same comedian you were 10 years ago?
MM: No. definitely not. I used to be a very angry, people would say,
provocative [comedian]. I think I'm still provocative but I don't go for the— I'm not as defensive or shocking as I used to be. Or angry. I think I've pulled away from politics a bit. I want to try to have the same type of experience with my audience as I do with my friends, in a way. I'm still myself but I don't have any fear or any grandiosity from that fear.
CP: From an outsider's perspective: You don't give a too much of a shit any more. It's a weird mix of confidence and neuroses.
MM: My exasperation that comes from trying to find your place in show business — I think that's faded a bit. And also the panic of not getting over on a crowd, that seems to have gone away. I'm definitely more relaxed and open about things. I think that's a good observation. I think I've grown up a little bit.
CP: Are you the Art Bell of comedy?
MM: Oh sure, wait till these aliens land, because they've got some stand-ups in outer space that no one knows that are fucking geniuses. Very hard to understand 'cause their references are all outer space references. But I'm looking forward to them coming down soon, and coming to the garage. I'm waiting for that. I've got a beacon on top of the garage.
CP: Do you know what I mean, though? He could take anything and make it out to be a sign of the apocalypse.
MM: See, I feel like I'm less cynical and less dreading. I think if there's a darkness to it all, it's just you know underneath the surface of every person there's some sort of potential apocalypse. There's something being fought back for the sake of someone's families and the security of their jobs. You have to keep a lot inside.
CP: For some comedians, their act is an escape.
MM: Yeah. I can't escape. I have a hard time with that. Unless I'm gonna sit down and eat ice cream with the crowd, or watch a movie. No, I'm not just about entertainment for entertainment's sake. I'm not saying I'm against that, I'd like to be more of that, but I do seem to place myself at the center of things. I seem to want to think about things and figure things out.
CP: Art Bell would do his show alone in the desert in his doublewide trailer. You're similar in that way, in your opening monologues on the show, a guy alone with his thoughts.
MM: As we speak I'm that guy sitting alone in my garage. Surrounded by books that mostly are unread, or only 20 pages in. A lot of art work around, lot of bits and pieces I've picked up over the years of my life, all kinds of shit in here. I've got to get rid of it. I think I'm a hoarder. I can't tell if I'm a hoarder or nostalgic. That's my take on it.
CP: Well, the second might lead to the first.
MM: Yeah, but why does everything have to be a sickness? Why can't a guy just feel safe in his stacks of books protected and insulated and somewhat more intelligent just for owning the books?
CP: Why do you think you're so good at making doom and gloom enjoyable?
MM: I guess it's doom and gloom, I don't know. I assume that much of our life is spent trying to come to peace with the fact that it doesn't really end well for any of us but it does end.
And either you can avoid it or you can somehow acknowledge it. And I think acknowledging it with a little bit of a sense of humor is probably a pretty good thing. It's gotta be better than living in denial completely.
I don't know why I'm so good at it. I come from a sort of cynical weird worrying negative father. And I think most of my life I've had to make him feel better. So I think I owe him credit for that.
CP: I know he's been on the show a couple times...
MM: He doesn't know he's been on the show. I don't want him to know. He can't figure out how to do it, so I leave it at that. I don't' tell him that I record it.
CP: So, why does your IMDB page say you were on
Patty Duke when you were like two years old?
MM: I don't know. I wrote them about that. I don't know why they didn't take it off.
CP: So it's definitely not true?
MM: If it is I have no recollection of it. Maybe I should ask my parents. But I think they would have told me that.
CP: So
WTF's most famous moment so far must be your two-parter with Carlos Mencia, where you talk to him about the accusations that he steals jokes.
MM: I didn't set out to tear him down. The first interview was to make some sense of— I didn't know how big the accusations were, or how horrible, or how hated he was, I just knew that we had done these comedy half hours in '95 together for HBO. But I'm not a big gossip. I don't hang around and get all the dirt on everybody, you know.
I just wanted him to come in and try to explain a little bit why he thought he was in that place. I was sympathetic.
But then I felt like he bullshitted me. And then I went out and interviewed a couple guys that knew him, and I had to call him back and say: Look, you know, I need you to answer these questions. It was never my agenda to persecute the guy or crucify him.
CP: Do you feel like he felt that way?
MM: No. I just talked to him the other day. I didn't know how he felt but he lives in sort of a bubble, that guy.
It takes a lot for him I would think to just get out of bed sometimes, with that much hate coming at him and also that he's got some serious psychological issues, I don't know what it is, I'm not a professional, but.
CP: Do you get the feeling he doesn't Google himself?
MM: To what end? I would think that what he's doing is trying to live with what's being said about him and also to live with whatever his personal truth is. The second episode — he was clearly at war with himself somehow. He's got a lot on his plate, to deal with his own inner battles.
CP: So, what's up with all these birds dying?
MM: There's no doubt there's a disruption in the force. I didn't hear about it. I was talking to somebody last night about bedbugs. You know, why now? I was like well there's a disturbance in the force. What are you gonna do? The bees are dying, the bedbugs are out of control, the birds are dying. We're in a closed system, here. It can only take so many toxins before the system starts to fuckin' die. But anyway, I'm gonna be at Helium and it's gonna be funny.
STARTING TONIGHT: Marc Maron does stand-up comedy, Wed.-Sat., Jan. 12-15, $10-$15, Helium Comedy Club, 2031 Sansom St., 215-496-9001, heliumcomedy.com.
