May
23
23
zoom in
Not THE longform piece about Maron (that’s still forthcoming—who’s gonna write it? I hope it’s Pappademas) but definitely A longform piece about Maron, and a wonderfully observant and measured one. Choice cut:
Maron’s interviews exist somewhere outside of the polite Tonight Show format, where one humbler, funnier person asks a self-involved, possibly vapid person some questions that have been prescreened by an army of publicists. Every Letterman and Leno interview goes down easy in the same way. Every Maron podcast self-combusts, picks itself back up, and drags itself across the 75-minute mark. The repetition of his specific traumas — “the Lorne meeting,” cocaine, and comedy clubs — creates something of a narrative structure for every unctuous, predictable talking point. Maron is narcissistic, chauvinistic, and still living in the drugged-out comedy clubs of the late ’80s and ’90s, but he somehow pulls all these things into a powerful, compelling, and, most important, funny neurosis.
