For years I’ve been listening to Marc Maron’s excellent podcast “WTF”, and now pod has morphed into video and begot a funny show on IFC called “Maron“.
By Robert Lloyd
In “Maron,” Maron plays himself (or the more difficult aspects of himself, though he will sometimes let the sunshine in): a comedian who does a podcast from his garage, is a sober-living alcoholic, plays a little guitar and has cats, or cares for them.
As an actor, he is, one would say, playing the role he was born to, and he is most convincing — by which I mean relaxed — when alone, speaking into a microphone or re-creating the podcast (many famous faces face his). He is convincing enough, in any case, to play a black cloud, and he is supported by excellent professionals in big roles and small. Judd Hirsch continues as Marc’s father, and Sally Kellerman happily gets a lot more to do this year as his mother. Continue reading
Video Clip – Maron Season 3 Trailer
Maron: Season Two
Among an artist’s more difficult feats is to sell audiences his or her bona fides as a person with relatable everyday problems. Art concerned with the working-class almost always scans as disingenuous because the existence of the art itself represents transcendence—whether it’s imaginative, empathetic, or, at least, productive—that isn’t achieved by most people. When Charles Bukowski, say, wrote of his life as a bum, you firstly register the forceful poetry of his despair. Though remarkably shorn of artistic vanity, Louis C.K.’s work is most immediately notable for the razor-sharp incisiveness of his social observations.
Maron, however, almost manages the feat of the celebrity-as-everyman because it actively wrestles with the fashions with which we compare ourselves to other people, and its behavioral conclusions aren’t encouraging. The series is engaging in its passive-aggressive humanism, which is to say that it’s some kind of feat of contradiction. Continue reading
