This morning, Patton Oswalt and Marc Maron happened to be on the same flight from NYC to LA. They couldn't sit together, as Patton was in first class and Maron was stuck in coach. So they did what came most naturally: they tweeted at each other from different parts of the airplane. And it was wonderful. Here's the full exchange, in chronological order for your easy reading pleasure:
Marc Maron is releasing a special edition box-set of the first 100 episodes of his podcast, WTF. Included are many of the interviews that really defined the show, like Carlos Mencia, Dane Cook, and Robin Williams. The compilation goes on pre-sale tomorrow, April 17th, at AST Records.
Hulu's A Day in the Life series has an episode up now that follows Marc Maron as he records a WTF episode with Mindy Kaling and does some time at the Comedy Store. Fair warning: a good percentage of this episode is devoted to fixing Maron's espresso machine.
After the clip-and-music driven intro to almost every WTF with Marc Maron podcast, the show’s host introduces himself and welcomes his listeners. But instead of merely acknowledging the masses who have made WTF one of the most popular podcasts on the iTunes store and everywhere else, Maron lists and classifies them.
Over the course of 240 episodes, he has grouped his audience into categories ranging from the mundane (“What the fuckers”) to the arcane (“What the Fuckminster Fullers”). There have been creative references to patriotism (“What the fuckanadians”), activism (“What the fuccupy Wall Streeters”) and Cosbyism (“What the fuckstables”). And yet perhaps the most interesting part of each nickname sequence is Maron’s [...]
Here's an email exchange between Marc Maron and Bob Lefsetz of The Lefsetz Letter following Lefsetz' post on an old episode of WTF that listeners needed to pay for. It's a super interesting read for people who like thinking about business models for new content formats and also eavesdropping on other people's conversations.
Multiple times throughout the interview, Conan told Marc, "I'm worried about you." It seems reasonable, considering they've known each other for a while and Marc is Marc. And Marc, with his new haircut, does not disappoint, using his TV appearance to reason out Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation. Sadly, he doesn't follow through on it. That will have to wait until next sweeps. Below is the second part of the interview, in which he justifies having such a younger girlfriend, who seemingly has a list of all his friends that she is ready to sex if shit hits the fan. Classic Marc.
Bonnarooooo: not just a fun thing to yell when you're drunk and pretending to be a wolf! It's also a good source of comedy. The festival has paired up with Comedy Central for the comedy portion of its 11th incarnation this June 7-10, and they've announced performances from Aziz Ansari, Pete Holmes, Amy Schumer, Steven Wright, Garfunkel & Oates, Marc Maron, and more (full list below). Now go arrange your rides to Tennessee in the comments.
The SXSW comedy lineup is here, and incidentally, it's almost exactly the same as the invitation list for my dream wedding! (It's only missing Jughead from Archie Comics and Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn's characters from Wedding Crashers, because what's a dream wedding without crashers?) In addition to standup and improv galore, the schedule features live episodes of WTF, Comedy Bang Bang, Doug Loves Movies, You Made It Weird, and The Chris Gethard Show. As for the comedians themselves, there are almost too many great comics to name (for a start: Marc Maron, John Hodgman, Kristen Schaal, Mike Birbiglia, Amy Schumer, Eugene Mirman, TJ Miller, Reggie Watts, Kumail Nanjiani), [...]
As the first entry in a neat series in which comic book artist Harvey James draws podcast hosts before and after seeing their faces, he's done a really interesting pair of portraits of Marc Maron. After hearing Maron guest on Comedy Bang Bang, James says he had a picture of "an angry, difficult guy who talked about jerking off and eating snacks" that ended up looking quite different from the real Maron. So weird how vividly what we talk about, and the way we talk about ourselves, colors people's perceptions of us. And of our glasses.
There is something quaint, almost reassuring, about watching Patton Oswalt as a stammering host, wearing a white on white ensemble, nervously spinning his wristwatch with his left hand while gripping the microphone tightly with his right. The video is from 1993, before really either Oswalt or Maron had been doing standup for too long, and it's nice to see them before their respective Oscar buzz and New York Times profiles. The video comes from former comedian Marty Higgens's Vimeo channel, where there is also the below video of Patton Oswalt wearing a backwards hat and a red blazer, which I assume he purchased from J.C. Penny's Do The Right [...]
The podcast-inspired pilot Marc Maron shot a while back has finally found a home. IFC is expected to announce this week that they've picked up ten episodes. No air date has been announced, but the show will join Comedy Bang! Bang! and Bunk in making IFC the new hot spot for comedy. I mean hot spot like a hip new nightclub, not like a "volcanic region thought to be fed by underlying mantle that is anomalously hot compared with the mantle elsewhere." That would be weird if I meant that second one, and would not make any sense in context.
Marc Maron just Tweeted the link to this video, a Robert Smigel-written TV Funhouse segment in which the educational program Conspiracy Theory Rock presents a catchy little ditty called "Media-opoly." The animation depicts the total control of the media by a few unregulated corporations – especially, yep, good old GE – who are also dumping nuclear waste directly onto playground woodchips. Big surprise, this clip was cut out from all but the first airing of its SNL episode. It's interesting to think about how far we've come in the last decade and a half, though, with 30 Rock casting GE's fictional parent company Sheinhardt Wigs as a [...]
“Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.” —Rainier Maria Rilke
Of all the titles and descriptors Marc Maron has acquired through the perilous swings of his long career, “Feral Cat Wrangler” might be, curiously enough, the most appropriate. It’s one he gave to himself, an acknowledgment of his inclination for taking in wild strays. But it also serves as a profound metaphor for his duties as host of the enormously popular WTF podcast, on which he welcomes in from the trenches of entertainment a long [...]
