WTF with Marc Maron Podcast

Comedian and writer Naomi Ekperigin is a cheerful person who also finds herself paralyzed with rage. It’s a balancing act she has to manage, just like she balanced her time in writers’ rooms with getting on stage night after night to work on her standup. Naomi and Marc talk about her family in Nigeria, working for the National Theater for the Deaf, editing an art magazine, and her time working on shows like Broad City, Difficult People and Good News.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jerry Stahl is one of Marc’s best friends. But sometimes you have no idea your best friend lived in a cave at one point. And that’s why you sit down with him in the garage. Jerry talks with Marc about his years of troubled behavior which led to a life threatening illness and doctors telling him he only had a year to live. Marc also finds out more about Jerry’s life as a writer, from his days working for porno magazines to his celebrated books like Permanent Midnight and his new book Nein, Nein, Nein! about self-discovery on a tour of concentration camps. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Kander was a rising star in national politics. In fact, he was staging a run for the Presidency and got the thumbs up from none other than Barack Obama himself. Then the roof caved in. Jason tells Marc why he needed to put everything on hold in order to treat his PTSD, something he’d been suffering since serving in Afghanistan eleven years earlier, but also something he wouldn’t allow himself to confront for more than a decade. Jason’s new book is Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Singer-songwriter Laura Veirs has something to prove with her latest album, Found Light. After divorce ended her 20-years-long collaborative relationship with her producer husband, Laura not only needed to prove she could create a new album independently, but she needed to be sure of who she was in the world going forward. Laura and Marc talk about love and loss and the power of therapeutic mushrooms. They also talk about how Laura suffers from imposter syndrome when she’s around her other collaborators, k.d. lang and Neko Case. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka has familiarity with garages. But unlike Marc, she didn’t start a podcast in one. She lived in one with her mother and grandmother for seven years, as three generations of immigrant women dealt with cramped quarters, eating disorders and schizophrenia. Atsuko tells Marc how she was unaware as a young girl that her trip from Japan to America was going to become permanent and how her discovery of standup comedy helped her find her voice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dana Gould is in his 40th year of doing standup. He and Marc talk about what they’ve learned in their decades of comedy, how they came to accept their limitations, and how they see themselves in today’s standup environment. Dana also explains why he went back on stage after years of giving it up to work on The Simpsons, why he feels that progress in comedy means knowing when you were wrong, and why he always goes back to George Carlin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kate Berlant’s comedy defies easy categorization. That’s okay with Kate, who thinks people use a lot of empty terms to pin down comedy. Kate and Marc talk about how growing up in the art world helped Kate take a different approach when she got on the comedy stage as a teenager. They also talk about Kate’s sketch work with fellow comedian John Early, the inspiration she took from the late Brody Stevens, and why her Bo Burnham-directed comedy special remains in limbo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Jen Statsky and her collaborators were creating the show Hacks, they knew they needed to nail the portrayal of life in standup comedy because comics will quickly know if they got it wrong. Marc talks with Jen about how they did, indeed, nail it. They also talk about her work at The Onion and on shows like Parks and Rec, The Good Place, Broad City and Lady Dynamite. Plus, Jen and Marc talk about stuffing your feelings, getting better at acknowledging them, and understanding why growing up in Boston might lead you to ignoring them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marc has a very direct question for his old friend Greg Proops: “Did we lose?” In the fight for the heart and soul of comedy, there is real uncertainty about the current trajectory. What legacy did the alternative comedy movement leave, if any? Did the Obama years create a false sense of security for popular comedians that made them drop the ball? Will a there be a counterforce to the dominant strain of reactionary backlash comedy? Marc and Greg interrogate these questions and their own roles in the past three decades of comedy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For a while, Lara Beitz could only get on stage to do comedy if she was hammered. She'd drink to feel less nervous but then there wasn't a time when she didn't feel nervous, so she was just always drinking. Lara and Marc talk about their shared experiences with addiction and recovery as they were developing their voices as comedians. Lara also looks back on an upbringing that was clouded by the specter of alcoholism and how she had to come to terms with it later in life.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.