It was rare that he would make it home in time for dinner. Barry Maron was an orthopaedic surgeon who was “absent and volatile, a depressive of sorts”. Maron got into comedy as a way of dealing with his father. I just kind of had a little overwhelmingly teary moment.” ![]() “I mean, I didn’t break down or anything. It was the relief and intensity of it.” He stops, embarrassed. I don’t know if it was pride, or because it went OK, or we did it. “It was this almost immediate, postpartum relief and emotion. After the president left, Maron started to cry. Maron liked Obama, finding him both sincere and impressive. Within a week, it had amassed 1.7m downloads and Obama’s use of the N-word garnered international headlines. “But I think part of the point that I wanted to make was that it’s not enough just to feel bad.” The podcast was listened to almost 750,000 times within the first 24 hours of going live – nearly quadrupling Maron’s record for the most downloaded episode in a single day. “The grieving that the country feels is real,” Obama said of the recent Charleston church massacre. In the resulting interview, the president talked frankly about race, poverty and gun control. He has the kind of brain, he says, that fixates on minor anxieties in order to avoid focusing obsessively on the bigger ones: “It’s a coping mechanism.” Pause. After months of to-ing and fro-ing, a date had finally been agreed. White House communications staff had approached them via their website a year earlier, as part of a broader strategy to get the president to connect with potential voters beyond the normal outlets for political discourse. Astonishingly, Maron and his producer, Brendan McDonald, hadn’t even put out the initial interview request. Other interviewees have included Judd Apatow, Amy Poehler and Ian McKellen.īut the president of the United States of America? That was a whole different ball game. The comedian Todd Glass came out as gay on a 2012 episode. A two-hour 2010 interview with Louis CK, in which the duo openly discussed their tricky 25-year friendship (Maron had been jealous of his peer’s success Louis CK had thought Maron unnecessarily aggressive and needy) was voted by the Slate website as the No 1 podcast episode of all time. People responded positively and WTF With Marc Maron hit the No 1 spot on the iTunes comedy chart a number of times. “I try to get a sense of people through different means: where they come from, where they grew up… I like to start with a question like ‘What street did you take to get here?’ just to get them going.” I think it took the president coming to my house to hammer it into my dad’s head that I have achieved something He never prepared a list of questions – still doesn’t – preferring instead to embrace the tangential detours of a more natural one-to-one. I was doing something I wanted to do and it filled a big hole in me of fear and insecurity.” He found that he enjoyed the new medium: “I was proud of myself for the first time in my life. Maron proved to be a free-ranging, easy-mannered conversationalist, unafraid to speak about his own vulnerabilities in order to get more from his guests. ![]() He turned his garage into a studio and started approaching friends for interviews. “I got into the podcast because I didn’t know what to do with myself and I was going broke,” Maron says. He was, by his own admission, bitter, sad and resentful. Despite a fairly healthy standup career (Maron held the record for most guest spots on the talkshow Late Night With Conan O’Brien), he had witnessed contemporaries such as Sarah Silverman and Louis CK become more successful than him. At the time, he had just been fired from his job on a liberal talk-radio station and was going through a costly divorce after the failure of his second marriage. How did Maron, a 51-year-old, twice-divorced, childless standup comedian with late-90s indie hipster facial hair and a penchant for lumberjack shirts, come to be interviewing the leader of the free world in his garage? To understand that, you have to go back to 2009, the year he started the WTF podcast: a twice-weekly encounter with fellow comedians, actors and directors. “Getting around that would be challenging.” “I knew that he would have a narrative on almost everything,” says Maron. He was worried, too, that his usual interview style – an intimate, conversational shooting of the breeze which relies on an upfront emotional connection – would not work on a media-trained public figure practised at politely dodging uncomfortable questions.
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