Marc Maron

Marc Maron (born September 27, 1963, Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American stand-up comedian and actor who was perhaps best known for the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, which often featured candid interviews with celebrities and newsmakers.

Maron’s father, a surgeon, began his medical career in the military and took his New Jersey-bred family to Alaska before settling in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Maron grew up. From an early age Maron aspired to be a comedian, and he immersed himself in the recordings of 1970s stand-up icons such as George Carlin and Richard Pryor. While Maron studied English and film at Boston University (B.A. 1986), he made his first forays as a stand-up comic. He then performed and worked in Los Angeles as a doorman at the Comedy Store. He also became the protégé of self-destructive “scream” comedian Sam Kinison and began abusing cocaine and alcohol. After stints in Boston and San Francisco, Maron relocated in 1993 to New York City, where he became a staple of the nascent alternative (heady, non-joke-based) comedy scene.

A trip to Israel in 1998 inspired Maron’s successful Off-Broadway show The Jerusalem Syndrome (2000) and a related book, in which, in part, he reflected on his Jewish heritage. Between 1994 and 2008 Maron became, with more than 30 appearances, one of Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s most-prolific guests. In 2004 he began his tempestuous tenure on left-leaning Air America Radio (AAR), from which he was fired and rehired twice. In 2009 Maron—in the midst of a divorce and struggling in his career, which was hindered by his crippling professional jealousy and anger issues—began sneaking into the AAR studios to record his podcast, WTF with Marc Maron. Each show generally began with a roughly 10-minute monologue by Maron and then segued into a long-form interview, initially of fellow comedians but later of other performers, writers, directors, and musicians.

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After he completed some 20 shows, Maron moved to Los Angeles and began recording his podcast in the garage (nicknamed the Cat Ranch) of his home. He proved to be an intuitive, empathic interviewer whose sincerity and intensity led guests such as Robin Williams to willingly shed layers of privacy. By 2013 the twice-weekly WTF was being downloaded between 2.5 million and 3 million times per month. Two years later Maron scored a coup when U.S. Pres. Barack Obama traveled to his garage studio to be interviewed.

The success of WTF and Maron’s memoir, Attempting Normal (2013), broadened the audience for his stand-up shows. The comedy TV show Maron, which aired in 2013–16 on IFC (the Independent Film Channel), featured Maron as himself. He also appeared in Easy (2016–19), an anthology series about Chicagoans dealing with everyday issues, and GLOW (2017–19), in which he portrayed a down-on-his-luck director who works on a women’s wrestling show. Maron was cast in a number of movies in 2019, including Sword of Trust, in which he starred as a pawnshop owner, and Joker, a gritty origin story about the iconic Batman villain. He later appeared in the crime comedy Spenser Confidential (2020). In the biopic Respect (2021), about legendary soul singer Aretha Franklin, Maron played record executive Jerry Wexler. In 2022 he lent his voice to the animated comedy The Bad Guys.