I’ve enjoyed over 100 of Marc Maron’s WTF podcasts. This smart comedian has a talent for coaxing surprisingly revealing and interesting things from his comedic guests which results in excellent and unique interviews not usually obtained by others.
Here’s what Jonah Weiner of Rolling Stone wrote: Acid-tongued, rage-prone satirist Marc Maron has been a stand-up-circuit fixture since the Eighties, hosting Comedy Central shows and befriending guys like Judd Apatow and Conan O’Brien along the way.
But his new podcast, “WTF,” may be his greatest achievement yet: a series of unvarnished shit-shoots with comedians that move from laugh-geek joke anatomy to quasi-therapeutic venting. Louis C.K. wept during his epic two-part interview. “The podcast began in desperation,” Maron says.
“I was broke, in the middle of a divorce, and I decided I needed to talk to my peers.” Maron’s guests range from comedians’ comedians like Todd Barry to hip young acts like Aziz Ansari to megastars like Ben Stiller.
The podcast has been good for his career — fans in the industry have approached him about developing other projects — but Maron says that’s just a happy byproduct. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do,” he says. “That’s rare.”
WTF podcast episode – Chris Rock talks about early days with Eddie Murphy
Here’s a good New York Times article: The Comic Who Explores Comedy’s Darkest Side by Dan Saltzstein
HERE’S a riposte you’re not likely to hear in an interview by Jay Leno or Charlie Rose: “You’ve got to have rage, man. Because I see the posture — your posture is built for rage.” That’s Marc Maron talking to Dane Cook, the popular but bland comedian, on an episode of Mr. Maron’s twice-weekly podcast.
On his show, whose title includes an exclamation that can’t be printed here, Mr. Maron, a stand-up comic by trade, has cast himself as an unlikely celebrity interviewer — one who is angry, probing, neurotic and a vulnerable recovering addict. And somehow he’s able to elicit from his guests, mostly other comedians like Sarah Silverman and Ben Stiller, the same level of vulnerability.
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Marc Maron stand-up comedy performance video
WTF Live with Seth Meyers
WTF – Rainn Wilson talks about his faith
Marc Maron with girlfriend Jessica
Louis CK vs Marc Maron in Louie episode
The final sequence of “Ikea/Piano Lesson,” last night’s “Louie,” felt if not quite on par with still certainly akin to the great, uncomfortable episode last season in which Louie (and Louis C.K.) sat down to talk to “Dane Cook” (and Dane Cook) about the accusations that the latter stole his some of his jokes. Like that, the scenes with podcaster extraordinaire and future IFC series star Marc Maron are instances of comedian inside baseball, demanding the context of the real life relationship between the two people on screen to be fully understood. The beef between C.K. and Cook was more public, contentious and easily graspable — a clash over lifted material and perceptions of integrity. The ties between C.K. and Maron, who were once very good friends, is more complicated — fortunately,these details are available at a download.
