![]() ![]() I don’t think I would be alive if I didn’t get sober.” I think the combination of staying sober and going through marriage, a bankruptcy, a career death, and divorce, which all culminated in creating the podcast, showed me something about myself and my ability to persevere and stick to who I am. “It enabled me to accept myself for who I really am. “In college you try to figure out How you fit in the world. The confessions occasionally include some from Maron himself, who stumbled through two marriages and years of addiction to cocaine and alcohol before getting sober in 2000. Other comics have talked about suicide attempts and their struggles with phobias. In one WTF podcast, comedian Todd Glass came out of the closet. Almost every episode features a confession that’s either touching or surprising.” “It’s that after all his years of living that life-the touring, the drugging, the ex-wives, the failure-he’s reached a point of brutal self-candor that makes people open up to him in a way they never would otherwise. “What makes the show so great isn’t just that Maron is smart, or funny, or smart about being funny,” Eells writes in a September 2012 profile. Maron earned his success, says Rolling Stone writer Josh Eells, by being honest. Maron is in some ways the Conan O’Brien of new media, and in fact the two have swapped roles, with O’Brien the interviewee on WTF and Maron often a guest on Conan. Last July, Maron released his 300th episode of WTF, a milestone in a parade of remarkably frank conversations with many of the biggest names in entertainment: writer-producer-director Judd Apatow and comedians such as Amy Poehler, Zach Galifianakis, Mindy Kaling, Ben Stiller, Ray Romano, Chris Rock, Jason Sudeikis, Robin Williams, Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Fallon, Ed Helms, Garry Shandling, and Jonathan Winters. Podcasting is still a new thing, and there are still many more people not listening to podcasts than listening to them. “I don’t know about TV,” he says, “but terrestrial radio is certainly taking a hit. That’s success by any measure, but Maron expresses doubts that new media shows like WTF might do to TV talk shows what has done to brick-and-mortar booksellers. Maron won’t say what he makes for an episode, but a February 2012 profile on reported that it was as much as $15,000. ![]() Every episode is sponsored, many by or Comedy Central. Maron’s online venture is remarkable in another way: it makes real money. And starting the first week of May, he will play himself in a half-hour television series on the Independent Film Channel (IFC). Since launching his twice-weekly podcast from his garage in 2009, he has become a Renaissance man in the comedy world, as well as something more interesting: a new media talk show host, whose searing candor attracts millions of listeners-2.5 million to 3 million downloads a month-figures that often make him number one on the iTunes comedy chart. Maron’s days of struggling in gritty or far-flung venues are long gone. And they’d give you a map and $75, and you’d travel anywhere from 25 to 500 miles in your car to do a two-man show and open for one of these guys. “When I started doing comedy around here,” says Maron (CAS’86), who lives in Los Angeles, “basically what you would do is you’d get about 25 minutes of material and then you get booked through an agency. The last time Maron was in Boston, he was a fresh-faced comic commuting from New York City to open for top-shelf comics like Jimmy Tingle and Tony V, both of whom share the stage with him this January night in 2012, in a performance whose crowd magnet is clearly Maron himself. “The worst memories in my life are in this town,” he cracks, explaining his discomfort. MARC MARON is sitting on stage in a crowded Wilbur Theatre in Boston, hosting a live version of his wildly popular podcast WTF with Marc Maron, and feeling, for someone who makes a living revealing painful personal flaws, strangely exposed. ![]()
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