![]() ![]() It’s a very strange thing I do and I don’t really know many people that do it my way. NC: Is the material constantly evolving up until it’s go time for the HBO special? It really felt like my experience with the audience was that they were almost waiting for someone to talk about these things, with the cultural stuff and with grief as well. I took some risks with that and I definitely rode an edge. If anything, that’s what you want comedy to do. It was finding the tone and the balance of what I was talking about to present it in a way where people could have some relief around it. So, being frank about it was a relief, so my concern wasn’t really being too bleak. What any of us have to go through in this particular era, not to see the bleakness, it’s a day to day thing. MM: Yeah, it took a long time to put it together and to make things ride that edge. As an artist, was there a part of you that worried about being too bleak? We do see you working through it all on stage, even though I imagine you were workshopping this over the last two years. NC: Sometimes the best kind of work comes out of grief, it comes from tragedy. With Netflix, you don’t even know what’s on there but HBO as a brand does maintain its integrity to a degree. ![]() MM: Yeah, because you go on there and they have a handful of things. NC: When you’re watching something on HBO it really does feel like an event. I think that most of my audience or people who would engage with what I do are HBO viewers, so for a number of reasons it was a tremendously exciting thing to have an HBO hour I got tremendous support from HBO, and they curate their content, and there are great shows on there. It was almost like a childhood bucket list thing to do an HBO special. It meant something and so I was honored in some weird way. HBO, when I was coming up, was not unlike a Letterman slot. Whatever the algorithm honors is who gets the big cash and who is put in a position to do more and more specials no matter the quality. I did two or three specials for Netflix and within a week it becomes difficult to find on the platform. Despite what anybody says, I think the Netflix model has done more damage than good in terms of quality in stand up in a way that there are many things on there that you can’t find. Because of that, does this stand up feel different? For so long, having a comedy special on HBO meant you’ve made it. What’s the alternative? To have people say it’s terrible, and it really made me sad. Niki Cruz: It feels weird to say because of the nature of the stand up, but I enjoyed From Bleak to Dark. Over time that goes away, and you’ve reached a level of comfortability up there.” Photograph by Oluwaseye Olusa/HBOĪwards Radar sat down with Marc Maron over zoom to talk about what it’s like to have a special on HBO, his process of developing From Bleak to Dark and balancing his multi-hyphenate career. It was shallow in thinking I’m the angry comic, but really it was about hiding something-fear primarily. “I have grown okay with sort of profound vulnerability up there.” Said Maron. There’s no corner Maron doesn’t explore in the HBO special from his grief over the sudden death of his girlfriend and director Lynn Shelton to talking about anti-woke comics, and his renewed relationship with his father, Maron is wide open, and he might be at his funniest because of it. ![]() He’s recently had a few big profiled comedy specials, but his most personal special, From Bleak to Dark, breaks new ground. Then there’s the large listening audience of his podcast and the way he effortlessly connects with WTFers on social media-he feels accessible.īefore his podcast, in the 90s and early aughts, Marc Maron was a stand-up comic, appearing on the late night circuit, being a regular at The Comedy Store, and experiencing the ebbs and flows of that life. ![]() His interviews with guests on his WTF podcast are often insightful and cut through the artifice into profound, more meaningful conversations with some of the biggest names in pop culture and Hollywood. One of the most engaging qualities about Marc Maron is his vulnerability and his ability to connect with someone (we saw that when he spoke to Joey here last year). ![]()
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