Marc Maron Thinks He Paved the Way for Joe Rogan and… All the Rest of It. Is He Right?

It is fitting that for as much time as I've spent listening to Marc Maron hold forth about comedy, I can't recall ever hearing him tell a joke. Like so many other Americans, I was introduced to the man when he was adrift in his mid-40s and coming to terms with a rapidly stagnating stand-up career. Sure, Maron had plenty to hang his hat on; his summary was studded with Comedy Central half-hours and Conan stints, and he spoke, ebulliently, about his days grinding at the craft on the hallowed ground of Los Angeles' Comedy Store. But by 2009, with peers like Louis CK and Jon Stewart soundly lapping him at the box office and on TV screens, it became clear that Maron was never going to be a star in the way he once imagined. A rebrand was the only option, and thus began WTF With Marc Maron. The first episode featured an interview with Jeff Ross, recorded in the garage Maron had converted into a makeshift studio. The two beat around low-stakes backstage gossip in a conversation that was punch-line-free and strangely tender. It was lightning in a bottle. Maron had launched a new kind of podcasting, and comedy would never be the same.

You can find the formula Maron established all those years ago pretty much everywhere else in the industry. The Joe Rogan Experience, which debuted mere months after WTF, shares the exact same DNA: long-form, meandering, sometimes surprisingly personal chats with miscellaneous stand-ups and gadflies. (Naturally, in a previous life, Rogan was also a Comedy Store regular.) This also goes for This Past Weekend With Theo Von, another of America's five most popular podcasts , or Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend , which sadly ranks nowhere near as high. Hell, you can even hear his influence in The Ezra Klein Show. Maron was among the first people to discover that the shaggy nature of the medium was an asset, capable of purging the artifice from celebrity interviews, resulting in an end product that simply feels realer than the typical junket stops—Hugh Laurie yukking it up with Jimmy Kimmel, or whatever.

And yet, Maron has some regrets. Big ones. In fact, earlier in the summer, Maron announced that WTF won't survive the year. And as he's examined the current state of podcasting, with its rightward drift , he's been wondering aloud if he inadvertently created a monster. “We helped unleash an exciting type of delivery system for pure self expression,” Maron wrote in a newsletter. “Sadly, on some level, we also unleashed a format that can be used for dubious means, propaganda and pure evil.” If Maron ended this spiel with a note of self-deprecation, it was only to say that at least he wasn't J. Robert Oppenheimer, as he added, “But hey, it's not the atomic bomb.”

On the broadest possible level, I can see where Maron is coming from. It is true that WTF was one of the foundational pieces of an alternative media ecosystem that, way down the line, emerged as the bleeding edge for an ongoing right-wing cultural takeover. A faint line can be drawn from Maron's body of work to Theo Von describing the psychotropic effects of cocaine to an enthralled Donald Trump. (After all, WTF was once the site of a groundbreaking Obama podcast appearance , back in 2015.) However, if I may gently nudge back on Maron's defeatism—which is often the man's natural remaining state—I think that's the exact wrong way to sum up the show's legacy. Podcasting may now be lorded over by enablers and charlatans, but WTF was centered around a different project entirely: the search for humanity, whether in comedy or otherwise.

My most ardent days as a WTF listener overlapped with the show's earliest era, back when Maron was mostly interviewing other comedians about the various indignities that come with the trade. Those discussions all followed the same pattern. We begin, of course, with a back-and-forth about how a comic came up, and who they came up with—a dialogue that was studded with the names of ancillary promoters, agents, and club owners that are immaterial to anyone outside the business itself. (These preambles were consistently more riveting than they had any right to be—rich with jargon and nightlife politics, a glimpse of a lifestyle few of us possess but almost everyone has at least considered.)

From there, Maron would traipse toward the things he knew best: resentments, anxieties, vulnerabilities, and how those sore spots have inflected a performer's sensibilities. Depending on the episode, this exploration could be fairly mild—the divulging of run-of-the-mill divorce anguish, or a falling-out with a family member—but at its best, WTF could become bracingly, uncomfortably intimate. This was especially the case when the source of those grievances was Maron's own character. I recall, for instance, when he hosted comedian Morgan Murphy for a two-hour heart-to-heart that roiled with understated tension. The source of that apprehension? Halfway through, it is revealed that the two of them were once enmeshed in a torrid situation, shortly after Maron's divorce from his second wife. Doing the math, it's clear that at the time of the entanglement, Murphy was in her mid-20s, while Maron was in his 40s.

“I can't imagine what an emotional disaster I was,” he said quietly, finally addressing the elephant in the room.

“Yeah,” replied Murphy. “I can.”

The best WTF episodes always doubled as an air-clearing between Maron and his vast collection of strained relationships. (A documentary about him, to be released later this year, is aptly titled Are We Good? ) Surveying the ruins of a misbegotten tryst is an especially vivid example of the show's magic, but longtime fans can also recall the epic two-parter with Louis CK, whose friendship with Maron became poisoned by the latter's professional jealousy. (Years later, Maron would unfurl a remarkable monologue about how much he knew about CK's sexual misconduct, and when.) Other personal favorites include a heated encounter with Dane Cook during the late stages of the comedian's imperial era in the industry, the interrogation of a defiant Jay Leno about the Tonight Show debacle, and an exchange with the softie comedian Nick Thune about, more or less, why it always seemed like Maron never liked him. (They bury the hatchet.) The man had a way of never presenting himself as anything other than who he was, and has always been: petty, thin-skinned, and the proprietor of unlimited grudges. But to his eternal credit, Maron was also more than game to talk things out and fumble toward the truth, with his audience standing by as the eternal jury.

For a few years there, the world of comedy was remade in Maron's image. Comedians spilled their guts both in his studio and on stage, and comedy clubs increasingly began to resemble group-therapy clinics. When I think back on WTF today, what surfaces in my mind is the openness with which he spoke about his mental health: the dread, the phobias, the bizarre little neuroses that could derail an episode with tail-chasing digressions. In turn, Maron prodded his guests to expand on their trauma in a way that could be legitimately paradigm-shifting. ( Wait, you're telling me that Bob Saget has depression? ) It promulgated a mythology that endures to this day: Everyone who's ever succeeded at an open mic is catastrophically unwell, a motif that has since been threaded through Apatow movies , Netflix specials, and, if we're being honest, a lot of trite, self-serious stand-up. An entity like Nanette likely does not exist without Maron redefining the way audiences understood comedy and its community of performers. The backlash that came afterward? The rebirth of Bill Maher and Kill Tony ? Well, that might be partly his fault, too.

As the WTF brand grew, Maron moved away from the rinky-dink stand-up angst that originally attracted me to the show. He remained a sharp interviewer, observant and agile—a total pro who, we must remember, was a radio host for Air America long before WTF hit the air—but the star power of the guests slowly grew brighter, and more distant from his own world. Over time, WTF lost its status as this sacred place for embittered stand-ups to try to deduce the meaning of their careers. Instead, it just became another big-ticket interview podcast, competing with a wide array of imitators it inadvertently spawned. Its calling card—the shock that someone famous might reveal visceral parts of themselves in front of a microphone—is simply not nearly as extraordinary as it once was. We have inherited an earth where Gwyneth Paltrow is dishing with Alex Cooper about whether Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio was better in bed. WTF reached the stratosphere, and cleared the way for everyone else.

This was certainly good for Maron— WTF provided a substantial boost to the host's other interests in the entertainment industry. He earned a couple of Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for his role as a cranky pro wrestling promoter on Netflix's GLOW , and from 2013 to 2016, he had his own sitcom, simply titled Maron , on IFC. Every installment of WTF begins with a short clip of Maron shouting “Lock the gates!” It's from one of his only real pre- WTF movie roles, in 2000's Almost Famous , in which he played “Angry Promoter”; by 2019 and 2020, he was on the big screen in leading roles .

But for stand-up fans, tuning in to the podcast every week didn't feel quite as crucial as it once did. I belong to a demographic of people that is capable of caring, massively, about the life and times of alt-comedy lifer Brian Posehn. The show, in its original conception, was exclusively concerned with those nerdy fixations. But how can you find time for him between Jeremy Allen White, Alexander Skarsgård, and Mariska Hargitay, all of whom have appeared on WTF this summer? Maron himself is older and considerably more famous than he was during his days as a nightclub also-ran. With all of the attention and acclaim—with the leader of the free world pulling up to his garage—it's hard to know if the minutia of Comedy Store intrigue was quite as material to him as it once was.

So maybe Maron has timed his exit from WTF perfectly. The grifters who've conquered podcasting have cast themselves as willingly gullible sycophants to the likes of RFK Jr., but Maron can rest easy knowing he never fell into the same trap. He showed us his ugliness—frankly, he never had the capacity to hide it—and asked us to trust that anyone can become a good person. Even you, even him.