Again within the Nineteen Nineties, when Marc Maron started showing on Late Evening With Conan O’Brien as a panel visitor, the comic would typically alienate the gang. Like most of America on the time, O’Brien’s viewers was unfamiliar with Maron’s confrontational model of comedy and his assertive, opinionated power. (In 1995, the identical 12 months he taped an episode of the HBO Comedy Half-Hour stand-up sequence, Maron was described as “so candid that lots of people on the enterprise facet of comedy assume he’s a jerk” in a New York journal profile of the alt-comedy scene.) However via sheer will, he would ultimately win them again. “You all the time did this factor the place you’d dig your self right into a gap after which come out of it and shoot out of it like this geyser,” O’Brien not too long ago informed Maron. “It was a roller-coaster trip within the basic sense.”
Maron, although, was hardly ever making an attempt to bitter the room. “I went on the market wanting that first joke to work each time! It simply didn’t,” he informed O’Brien. Even when he ultimately achieved some mainstream success via his long-running podcast, WTF With Marc Maron, Maron’s comedy remained an acquired style, equal components cantankerous and ruminative. Nonetheless, he reached that success by sustaining his artistic voice, not by compromising it. It’s an method partially born out of necessity, he acknowledges in Panicked, his new HBO Max particular: “I don’t know if all I’m doing is mining for gold in a river of panic.”
Panicked is the third particular from Maron this decade, following 2020’s Finish Occasions Enjoyable and 2023’s From Bleak to Darkish. On this free trilogy, the comic contends with catastrophic present occasions—local weather emergencies, COVID, the gradual rise of authoritarianism—whereas addressing difficulties in his private life. These specials characteristic Maron at his most managed: He delivers long-form cinematic narratives whereas dipping into character work (affecting voices, embodying personas) and experimenting with bodily comedy.
One recurring topic in Panicked is, for lack of a greater time period, all kinds of shittiness: Maron talks about his cat Charlie’s diarrhea troubles and the invention of rat feces in his crawl house, which ultimately prompts an existential spiral about why his house has seemingly turn out to be a rest-stop toilet for the neighborhood rodents. The theme—this sense of being surrounded by the muck—extends past the purely home. As he sees it, America has declined below fascistic management; democracy itself has nose-dived partially due to comedians who’re overly obsessive about censorship; Maron’s father’s thoughts is slowly decaying due to his dementia. In a single digression, Maron muses about numerous prospects for his personal corpse as soon as he dies: a cemetery burial the place nobody will go to him; a cremation the place his ashes might be probably combined into his cat’s meals; an environmentally pleasant burial in a forest that can sooner or later be developed into housing.
A few of these seem to be horrible choices for the afterlife, frankly—and whereas this riffing is humorous, it’s additionally unavoidably darkish. “I don’t assume that I ever obtained into this to be entertaining,” Maron tells his viewers. It’s an instructive, revealing sentiment he’s conveyed many instances earlier than, particularly on WTF, which he not too long ago introduced will finish this fall. Even when Maron was a youthful, extra aggressive comedian, his jokes have been all the time a automobile for recursive self-reflection. He held folks’s consideration by exposing his psyche and excavating humor from the act of emotional vulnerability.
On the similar time, Maron’s work has by no means been about private confession for its personal sake. Think about a prolonged bit from Panicked throughout which he remembers sexual trauma he could have skilled as a toddler. When Maron and his brother have been youthful, he explains, that they had an older male babysitter who requested them to sexually service him. Maron isn’t sure whether or not he complied (although he admits that it’s distinctly doable), however he proceeds to itemize different childhood traumas, akin to being shamed for his weight by his mom, that he considers “a lot worse than blowing the babysitter.”
Maron begins the bit by insisting that he’s processed the expertise; the story isn’t meant to solicit pity or function the premise for a TED Speak–like speech about how one can overcome hardship. As a substitute, it’s a springboard to discover how folks in his orbit labored via the abuse that they’ve inflicted on others. He digs into what he describes as his mom’s neglectful parenting; he reimagines his previous babysitter as a current-day “anti-woke” comic who brags about his sadistic exploits. Anguish is redirected into forceful hypothesis, all with out sacrificing the laughs.
Since WTF premiered in 2009, Maron’s temperament has actually softened. However his perspective, and the best way he manages his feelings, have remained remarkably constant from the soar. Think about the hole in private circumstance between Panicked and 2009’s Ultimate Engagement, his third comedy album and among the most bitter stand-up I’ve ever heard. Although Ultimate Engagement was recorded at a private low and Panicked arguably at knowledgeable peak, he’s recognizably the identical particular person in each works. His topics and their contexts could change, however Maron’s type—his cheeky and dyspeptic supply, his wound-up physique language, the best way he can use a stool as rhetorical punctuation—has been fixed, an indication not of stagnation however of fact.
Whereas it’s doable to divide Maron’s profession into phases—not well-known after which sort-of well-known, grumpy and fewer grumpy—it’s higher to view his physique of labor as a continuum. In Finish Occasions Enjoyable, he directed outrage towards the normalization of California’s worsening wildfire seasons; by Panicked, the normalization has set in, and he tells a narrative about needlessly evacuating his house in the course of the fires that swept via Southern California earlier this 12 months. Equally, the craze he expressed in his following album, 2006’s Tickets Nonetheless Accessible, about George W. Bush utilizing the potential seize of Osama bin Laden as an electoral technique, will not be dissimilar from his incredulous anger in Panicked relating to voters wanting to say retarded with out reprisal.
If Maron’s perspective has modified, it’s in relation to evolving cultural norms. In Panicked, Maron describes his telephone as his “main emotional accomplice” with sarcastic resignation, a stance that amasses some historic weight on condition that, in 2002, he closed his first album by mocking the frenzied dread of an individual who had forgotten their cellphone. He’s additionally surrendered some floor on his long-standing discomfort with psychiatric treatment now that he takes an anti-anxiety tablet. (“Simply to report in, it’s not working,” he deadpans.) However private development is neither a straight line nor a complete transformation; typically it occurs by remaining current and actual in a world that provides little stable footing. The pleasure of Maron’s stand-up is witnessing him use his voice to repeatedly revise ideas amidst shifting winds—not a standard form of leisure, however a method that also counts for one thing.
