To be a longtime listener of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast is to have a poorer sense of the guests who sign up for his revealing conversations than for the self-confessed “angry comic’s” own biography.
He’s taken us from his drug-fueled apprenticeship under the shrill standup Sam Kinison to the thwarted SNL audition that deepened his resentment for the entertainment industry to his daily struggles in addiction recovery to that seminal 2015 interview with Barack Obama. When Maron and longtime producer Brendan McDonald announced in June that they would be winding down WTF after 16 years and more than 1,600 episodes, the news came as somewhat of a shock to many of fans who assumed – naively, selfishly – that the 62-year-old would just keep threatening retirement before he actually followed through. (Maron declared himself “burnt out” in the pod’s retirement statement.) Coincidentally, a 90-minute documentary has arrived to help with the letting go ahead of WTF’s final installment next Monday.
Are We Good?, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year, retraces the peaks and valleys of Maron’s singular show business career as the comedian processes the loss of his partner, the actor and film-maker Lynn Shelton. A former WTF pod guest who wound up directing Maron in his biographical cable sitcom, the Netflix wrestling dramedy Glow and two standup comedy specials, Shelton died suddenly from acute myeloid leukemia in 2020, during Covid. Director Steven Feinartz and producer Julie Seabaugh spent five years following Maron around as he puzzles through living and working around his grief. They watch Maron fumble through early standup sets and wallow in emotional anguish. During one visit to LA’s Comedy Store, where Maron got his start in show business as a doorman, he stares at the headshots on the wall and dryly picks out the dead faces.
Years earlier Maron considers walking away from show business altogether, to deadpan reactions from his cohorts who make a running joke of Maron’s acute exasperation. “[Marc] said the other day, ‘I don’t know, who said we have to do this forever?” recalled the comedian Caroline Rhea. “And I was like, we do! We all do. If you’re a real comedian, you have to do it forever. There’s no retiring.”
David Cross likens Maron to The Who as a poster for Maron’s latest tour, This May Be the Last Time, flashes on screen. “Didn’t they have like 11 last tours ever?”
“What? He’s going to get a boat and sail around Corsica or some shit?” John Mulaney quips. “As if he’s going to move to Vancouver and just be Marc Maron. That’s an insane idea.”
Significantly, Maron dismisses Joe Rogan and his “army of meatheads” as “hacks” for punching down on trans people and other marginalized groups – a line of attack he returned to recently as a lead-up to denouncing the comedians who signed on to perform at this month’s Riyadh comedy festival. “Full disclosure: I was not asked to perform,” he cracked, with trademark ironic detachment. “So it’s kinda easy for me to take the high road on this one, easy to maintain your integrity when no one’s offering to buy it out.”
In the doc, Maron falls back into the habit of measuring himself against his comedian peers he views as “more successful” than himself: Jon Stewart (whom Maron replaced as host of Comedy Central’s Short Attention Theater) and Boston standup scene partner Louis CK (whom Maron fell out with after CK confirmed the sexual misconduct allegations made against him in 2017). Maron’s retreat into self-loathing is a too-familiar exercise – and even harder to take on board as he currently stars opposite Owen Wilson in Apple TV’s Stick. But Maron’s parade of noteworthy friends (progressive commentator Sam Seder, the novelist Sam Lipsyte, SNL alumna Michaela Watkins) and Feinartz’s steely focus keep the subject from throwing the doc off its core story, a remarkable study in perseverance for restless late bloomers.
One would be hard pressed to name another standup comedian over the past 40 years who has proven to be as adaptable or as resilient as Maron, who could’ve easily crashed and burned after the apprenticeship with Kinison and wound up another Comedy Store cautionary tale. Instead, he slinked back home to New Mexico, got clean and moved to Boston, building his standup career in earnest on the way to becoming a regular on the Late Show with David Letterman and the most-featured standup comic ever on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. When flyover country club owners bristled at Maron’s abrasive style, he sharpened his voice at LA’s Largo theater – the bohemian laboratory that launched Jack Black, set the stage for Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and partly midwifed the US alt-comedy movement.
Most notably, as Maron’s second marriage was breaking apart, his addiction had come roaring back and his comedy acting career seemed like it had peaked with two episodes of Dr Katz and a memorable turn in Almost Famous (“Lock the gates!”). He then parlayed his star-crossed stint on the liberal talk radio network Air America into the foundation for WTF. With McDonald egging him on, Maron snuck into Air America’s LA studios to record the pod’s first episodes before moving the production into his garage, compelling celebrities and the president himself to make the pilgrimage. But even as his rogue operation turned out to be a total game-changer, not just for his career but the podcast boom that followed, Maron still struggled to see the forest for the trees.
At one point in the doc, he beats himself up for not being as good at playing the Hollywood game as O’Brien, Mulaney or Bill Hader – discounting the innate rebelliousness and stubborn determination that inspires such deep loyalty among his fans. When the New York Times profiled Maron in 2011, as WTF was emerging as a rival to Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, the breakthrough article wasn’t just an excuse to indulge in some thirdhand satisfaction for those of us who have been riding with Maron since his Short Attention Span Theater days. (He really doesn’t get enough credit for shaping millennials’ comedic sensibilities…) It was a stark reminder for us to carry on pursuing our passions until the resistance wears out.
Marc Maron and Barack Obama. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House
However, the thing that the doc captures so beautifully from its fly on the wall perspective (which the chronically neurotic comic can’t help second guessing along with Feinartz’s use of reconstructive animation) is Maron’s steadfast commitment to becoming a better human, no matter how much it breaks down him down or exposes him in the process. He could have quite easily become an angrier, more closed-off person after losing Shelton, the soulmate that followed so many bad romances. But he actually works through the grief against an ever-shifting minefield of Shelton artefacts: her cowboy boots, a bombshell journal entry wondering if Maron would love her “if I could just get Marc to love himself”. He savors their good times and funnels the most poignant excerpts into his best special yet (HBO’s From Bleak to Dark). Maron takes his reward when Shelton’s friends track him down to confirm that she definitely would’ve loved the jokes.
Movingly, Maron dotes on his father, a lifelong foil who was recently diagnosed with dementia, and lovingly skewers his old man on stage as he beams with pride from the audience. Even simpler moments like Maron noticing how jumpy his cats are when he calls them leads to the realization that “I don’t talk to cats right.” He throws himself a 60th birthday bash! For comedy’s dyspeptic high priest, this is commendable progress.
In the end, WTF is survived by a welter of podcasts that feature hosts yammering on about their particular craft and the wider state of culture – all of them pale imitations of Maron’s persistently untidy effort at investigating human connection. Are We Good? not only makes a noble case for Maron as the George Carlin of his day; it shows how honest self-reflection (often mistaken for oversharing) can bring about genuine healing while changing a person for the better, strengthening their integrity and keeping them true to themselves.
