“On some levels, I understand that this is like a breakup.” So said Marc Maron on his podcast last week, monologuing in his garage for a final time. WTF with Marc Maron wrapped its 16-year run on Monday; the comedian interviewed Barack Obama, a conversation recorded in Obama’s office. The chat was something of a victory lap for Maron, who made headlines for interviewing the then-president 10 years prior. (Back then, the pair met on the host’s home turf.) But, always conscious of WTF’s defining emotional intimacy, he also made sure to give his listeners one more unfiltered stream of consciousness.
“I live for connection,” he said during the penultimate episode. “I live for it because I need it to know that I exist.” Maron chased this desire for nearly two decades, his podcast charting his path: from a semi-floundering, twice-divorced, 40-something comedian trying his hand in a nascent medium, to the multi-talented performer he is now. He has developed into a well-regarded character actor; his stand-up is more popular than ever; and WTF became the pre-eminent chat show of a generation. Since 2009, Maron has evolved the interview format—and his approach has been much-copied, if never quite equaled.
Not one to stay comfortable, Maron ended WTF on his own terms. After almost 1,700 episodes, he explained in an interview Monday, he and his longtime producer, Brendan McDonald, were ready to be done. The host expounded upon that point in his last monologue. “I earned a living, I saved some money, but I think I missed a lot of life while I was in it,” Maron told listeners. His self-reflection was ultimately triumphant, but kept the tone that endeared him to his fans over the years: a familiar mix of wry self-awareness and gallows humor.
[Read: Marc Maron has some thoughts on that]
I started listening to WTF shortly after it began, as podcasting was finding a wider audience. I was barely aware of Maron, though he’d been performing for almost 20 years by then. He was likely best known to most for his HBO special or as a regular guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien; his brand of comedy was caustic and personal, blending confessions about love and relationships with some impassioned political awareness. A career built on vulnerability was likely key to his unwitting success as an interviewer. Maron found his big break after a turbulent run in radio anchoring a slew of programs on the progressive station Air America. After yet another of his shows was cancelled, he retained his keycard and started recording his own show in the station’s studios. Thus, he created WTF, despite barely knowing what a podcast was.
Maron moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter and established a more recognizable milieu—recording out of his garage in Highland Park, surrounded by his pet cats and artwork sent to him by fans. The majority of his early guests were comedians, most of them his peers on the standup circuit, like Janeane Garofalo or Todd Barry. Maron interspersed this lineup with younger faces on the scene that he might regard skeptically. (He memorably didn’t jibe with Nick Kroll’s stories of a happy childhood.)
Within a year, the names started to get bigger. His 67th episode was with Robin Williams, an interview that to this day demonstrates everything WTF could bring to the table. Williams was introspective about his own mental health battles and his history with lifting jokes from other comedians in the ’80s; the electricity between host and guest crackled the entire time. The DIY-style, down to the unvarnished location and simple recording equipment, would lull guests into a sense of security. The newness of the medium, too, was beneficial. With Maron, artists of all levels of celebrity felt able to speak more candidly than they ever would with a journalist or on a talk show.
“What helps him,” the filmmaker Judd Apatow told the New York Times in 2011, “is the fact that people mistakenly think that no one is going to listen to it, when in fact a ton of people listen to it, and it will last forever.” Apatow was one of WTF’s most devoted fans; he appeared during the show’s final weeks to play clips from the host’s most famous interviews, spurring further musings. The clearest takeaway from that greatest-hits episode was that, even as Maron has grown in fame and expanded his rolodex, his conversational approach has never really changed. Maron always went for a brash, chatty kind of familiarity, picking at the issues that fascinate him most—family trauma, addiction, romantic tsuris, and a pursuit of authenticity in art.
[Read: Marc Maron’s brilliant mistakes]
As Maron tackled chats with almost all his comedy idols over the years (and sometimes grilled his peers, such as the stand-ups Carlos Mencia and Gallagher), the program survived by broadening its remit. Maron disarmed musicians, actors, and filmmakers too—some of them plugging projects, others simply finding themselves in Maron’s garage out of intrigue or respect. When Obama first entered the “cat ranch” in 2015, it felt like a true watershed for podcasting as a whole. It was a sign that this was a world important people wanted to engage with, one that went beyond niche comedy fans.
Since then, the platform Maron helped create—the low-key chat show—has exploded into an industry worth billions. Comedians of all stripes now host back-and-forth chats, though few display the compassion Maron is known for. WTF has remained independent through it all, but Maron has (as is his wont) taken to decrying podcast trends he considers frightening. None has seemed to worry him more than the emergence of the manosphere, whose most popular figureheads have found a home in podcasting. “We helped unleash an exciting type of delivery system for pure self-expression,” Maron wrote in a newsletter this summer, reflecting on the growth in his field. “Sadly, on some level, we also unleashed a format that can be used for dubious means.” His critique of the medium, even as he winds down his own show, is reflective of Maron’s tenacity. He cannot help but charge at the topics that incense him the most.
Maron’s interest in the ways political winds have shifted since he first started podcasting is what made his final choice of guest interesting to me. Some fans might have been disappointed that he didn’t wrap it up with a personal hero he’d never spoken to, like Bob Dylan or Tom Waits. Inviting Obama back was a recognition of a groundbreaking moment for WTF, yes, but it also helped underline the host’s own anxieties. Maron, in recent years, frequently groused about the state of the country and the erosion of democracy. His conversation with the former president was professional and focused on one of Maron’s favorite subjects—the importance of human connection. It wasn’t the best episode of WTF. It was, however, WTF, and Maron, at their purest: concerned, empathetic, and punctuated with grouchy chuckles—not to mention just a little bit laced with doom.
