Marc Maron’s Brilliant Mistakes

The star podcaster’s success is rooted in his earlier failure and despair.

- James Parker

THE AMERICAN MONOLOGUE, once you get an ear for it, is everywhere, beguiling and blustering and buttonholing. It raises you up, it bums you out. It has its pulpits and its sanctified places the radio booth, the campaign trail, the AA meeting,the comedy club but it is not confined to them. Anywhere a mouth opens, anywhere the wind blows, you can hear it. The Ancient Mariner (U.S. edition) on the park bench, his mind at sea, his skinny hand upon your sleeve; the shopper behind her cart in the aisle at Whole Foods, loudly volunteering to nobody in particular, or to everybody in un particular, the information that she was expecting the place to be empty because it is so early; the newly met neighbor at the cocktail party, the fellow parent or dog owner, who talks into your face with such innocent and unflagging zeal that you begin to wonder whether he might be slightly insane all artists of the American monologue, all busy singing the song of themselves, like Walt Whitman and Donald Trump.Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF, is wonderful and precious because it is the place the only place where the American monologue becomes the American dialogue, where the riff and the harangue and the half-assed pitch are all accommodated and settled down and invited into a state of blessed relationship.

Maron, 52, is a stand-up comic of a certain vintage (bitter decades of road work, chaotic apprenticeships, poppings-up on the late-night talk shows, neurosis, divorce, addiction, envy), and he podcasts twice a week—Mondays and Thursdays—out of his garage in Los Angeles. Maron started doing