For dedicated fans of podcast savant Marc Maron, it can be a real challenge to list all the amazing aspects of his WTF podcast.
First there are the jokes; those are pretty good. Then there are the incredibly revealing interviews with comics and other performers.
Plus there’s the astonishingly consistent quality of those conversations: By now most of Maron’s guests know what to expect from the interviews, so they could easily prepare some boilerplate responses — but almost none of them does. Also there’s the incredible volume of podcast material available: 375 WTF episodes and counting, each one an hour long or more. And there’s the fact that practically every WTF episode has been made available (temporarily) for free — which for a product of this impossibly high quality seems to defy not just the rules of show business, but of capitalism itself.
So by now the WTF podcast exists in a realm beyond criticism. The only remaining question for the host is: How long can he keep it up? Producing all of this magnificent work — basically for free — must eventually take a toll on the man. And during Marc Maron’s appearance at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre on March 30, there were indeed some hints that the demands of this unique career were finally starting to catch up with the headliner.
Yet another remarkable fact about Maron’s WTF podcast is that he often approaches an interview subject with minimal-to-no advance preparation. You know this because Maron points it out regularly — or else his guest might allude to it, taking an opportunity in the charged atmosphere of the WTF studio (usually Maron’s garage) to throw another jab back at the host. But Maron’s lack of preparation does make some sense, in context. The man still has a standup act to polish, since he continues to tour as a working comic. And now he has a Portlandia-style television series to concentrate on as well: The show’s production might be complete, but as its premiere date (May 3) approaches he surely has some promotional work to do.
But on Saturday night at the Wilbur Theatre, Maron’s lack of preparation was a bit harder to understand. This show was taking place seven weeks later than originally planned: The previous date of February 8 had been moved due to a snowstorm. Yet in his standup gig at the Wilbur on Saturday (before the recording of a live WTF episode later that evening), Maron mostly discussed topics which seemed to occur to him right at that moment, stream-of-consciousness-style. Such topics included certain Boston neighborhoods’ hardscrabble reputations — yeah, amirite, people? And Maron’s early career, which began with him driving all over New England to perform at low-rent comedy gigs. And in lieu of telling finished jokes, Maron simply dissected his joke-writing process; in fact his notebooks came right onstage with him.
Then Maron began doing what comics call “crowd work.” This occurs when a comic engages directly with audience members, transparently looking for topics to riff on. Audience members’ unusual personal situations and vulnerabilities are fair game here. As near as I can tell, the main purpose behind crowd work is to allow the comic to search the audience for topics that he wants to discuss, but hasn’t written any specific jokes around yet.
(Also crowd work probably functions to keep heckling to a minimum. Because when a comic starts focusing his attention on individual audience members, I’ll bet everyone else feels relief that they’re not currently sharing the spotlight with the crazy person onstage.)
This might not sound very entertaining — watching an under-prepared comedian command a stage for ninety minutes while he casts around for something to talk about. And with most comics, that experience probably would be pretty dreary. But for Marc Maron, the act of working things out onstage still fits seamlessly into the overall theme of his comedy — due especially to the existence (and continued excellence) of his podcast.
WTF is billed as a “comedy” podcast — and it is pretty funny to listen to. In the usual comedic tradition, Maron’s most hilarious podcast moments occur when he’s not really trying to make jokes: For example, I get endless amusement out of picturing the prickly, one-sided conversations he claims to have with his cats. Meanwhile, guest comedians strive to avoid repeating their existing comic bits and instead let their humor emerge organically. And the non-comedian guests really seem to pull out the stops — as if they’ve been waiting their whole lives to show that they can be spontaneously funny too.
But WTF isn’t primarily an example of comedy. Instead it’s mostly about comedy: The business, the lifestyle, the competition. And not to be overlooked, it’s about jokes too: How to write them, how to tell them, how to know when they’re working and when to retire them. This “meta” approach to entertainment often signifies a lack of imagination and a fatal level of self-consciousness, in several genres: songs about music (sorry, Joan Jett), novels about writers, movies about moviemaking, television sitcoms about television. (This last item is why I can never be convinced to start watching 30 Rock. No letters, please.)
But when it comes to comedy about comedy — with Marc Maron, anyway — there’s something different going on. Somehow it all manages to hang together. There’s nothing funnier than two professional comedians trying to figure out why something is funny…then giving up and admitting that in the end, it’s just mysterious.
So maybe Maron’s inside-out approach to comedy works because the occupation of “comedian” is already absurd to start with: Standing onstage in front of large crowds with the overt premise that you’re going to make them laugh. Or maybe it’s because comics are naturally analytical people who receive (brutally) immediate feedback on their successes and failures. Or maybe it’s just because despite everything else, the practitioners still manage to get off some good jokes once in a while.
Caricature of Marc Maron by DonkeyHotey/Flickr.
