Early in his most
recent HBO comedy special From Bleak to Dark, Marc Maron talks about
conversations he’s been having with comedians his own age who say that being
woke has ‘ruined’ their careers’
“I’m against being
woke, man.”
“What’s wrong with
it?”
“I can’t say what I
think.”
“Uh, yes you can.”
“No, they won’t let
me say what I want.”
“You still can. It’s
just that there are consequences now.”
It’s hard not to
imagine Maron having conversations like this with people like Bill Maher, considering
that’s basically been his act for his entire career. Maron must look at this
with a particular amount of pain, considering that his career in a sense has
its origins in the same time and place and Maher.
For those who do
not remember what Comedy Central was like in the pre-South Park-Daily Show era
of the early to mid-1990s, the only word that fits it batshit. After they began
to move away from reruns of black and white comedies, they came to a very
bizarre mixture of reruns of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, an assortment of original comedy series
that were extremely hit or miss, if extremely funny at times, and very rarely
lasting more than a season or two. (Stephen Colbert’s career actually began
with a very weird sketch comedy series called Exit 57 and for much of
his time on The Colbert Report he was have former cast members Paul Dinello
and Amy Sedaris make appearances. ) Much of the rest of the programming was
filled with stand-up collections or clip shows. It was on Short Attention
Span Theater, one such show that had been around since the network had
debuted in 1990, that I first became aware of Marc Maron.
In hindsight, it’s
not so much a surprise that Maron didn’t rise to stardom during this period but
that Bill Maher managed to. There were a lot of comic hosted shows in the early
years of Comedy Central – Comics Only hosted by Paul Provenza and Women
Aloud hosted by Mo Gaffney – but that Maher’s managed to get a late night
job was frankly remarkable. Hosting a
clip show was never going to launch anybody into the stratosphere and it’s not
like Maron was ever given really much to do when it came to introducing clips. I
don’t know which came first – Maron’s departure or the show ended but by 1997, Maron
was gone.
Maron spent the
next decade basically in the world of stand up and didn’t start to find his
niche until the creation of podcasting. He also did a fair amount of voice work
in animated series. In the last decade, thankfully, the rest of the world has
caught up to him particularly when it comes to Peak TV. He played a variation
of himself on IFC’s Maron, a series that was a variation on shows like Louie
and Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a sense, his role of a lifetime came as
Sam Sylvia, the very troubled creative force behind the 1980s Women’s Wrestling
show in Glow Netflix’s extraordinary comedy series that fans are still
bemoaning that we never got a proper ending to.
Maron was nominated for multiple awards for his work; the fact he never
got an Emmy nomination truly offends my sensibilities.
During this same
period, he found happiness with the exceptional female director Lynn Shelton.
Shelton was a talent from some of the most undervalued films of the 2010s, including
Your Sister’s Sister, Laggies and Sword of Trust, the latter of
which she made with Maron. She also worked throughout the era of Peak TV, not
only on Maron and GLOW but also such classic series as The
Good Place, Casual and The Morning Show. Her last work was to direct
four episodes of the incredible Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere.
But in May of 2020,
Shelton fell ill and was taken to a hospital. During her examination, it was
found she had been suffering without diagnosis from myeloid leukemia. Less than
a week later she was dead at only 54. When I learned that Shelton and Maron had
been romantically involved at the time, my heart ached in a sense not only for
Shelton but Maron. As someone who has been a fan of his work and who wanted
happiness for him, I felt pain. . I was thinking of that when From
Bleak to Dark premiered earlier this year.
Maron managed to
keep going in the interim. He would later star in Respect and do voicework
in The Bad Guys and League of Super-Pets. But I truly wondered
how he would handle it, or if he even would. The special that followed demonstrated
just how much of an artist Maron is.
Maron has never
been anywhere near as political as Maher.
After dealing with the ‘woke’ issue, he basically spent the next ten
minutes dealing with politics. He clearly has the same cynicism Maher does, but
he directs it outward. He clearly doesn’t like Christianity but it is from the
perspective of someone Jewish. He says the marketing for Christianity is
basically: “Everything will be great after you die. Put some money in
the jar.” He also really leaned into the idea of his Judaism: “we will replace
you’ he said almost casually and speaks of his ‘George Soros minted diamond’.
(We all have one, he says.) And his position on abortion clinics is that the
problem is branding: “We should call them angel factories…and then I think the
mood outside those clinics would change dramatically.”
But after that
Maron moves away from politics together and directs his comedy towards a place
Maher has never done in the thirty years I’ve watched him: himself and his
family. It’s clear he has a trouble relationship with his parents. He spends
several minutes first saying his father has dementia, then saying, “Don’t miss
the sweet spots” and says that he’s waiting with joy for the day his father
forgets who he is. He doesn’t seem to quite think the same towards his mother
but perhaps that because, as he puts it, “she’s still lucid.” He says he’s been asked by friends whether he
should let go of his bitterness and he always says to them: “F--- you! It’s their
fault!” (It’s worth noting that Maron is also very aware of his own flaws
as a human being, which I will get to in a very specific way later on.)
And then in the
heart of the special Maron does deal with what happen to Shelton. He admits
that dealing with his grief was very hard, particularly since it was at the height
of the pandemic and no one could come and see him. He says the only people who
understood were his neighbors, and in a way their support helped him. He also
remarked on just how people helped through the process: “If you’ve got smart
friends, you get like, five copies of the Joan Didion book” and then he found
himself wondering, “as a creative person, does that mean I have to start
writing about this?” He also remembers hearing someone say something about how
Lynn would come back in some form and he
didn’t buy it…and then one day a hummingbird flew near him and he ceased on
that.
But because he’s
Maron he tells about the first joke he ever wrote when it came to dealing with
Lynn’s death. I won’t spoil it for you, save to say it involved his visit to
the hospital after Shelton had died and what happened after he said goodbye to
her. What’s actually far funnier is his reaction after writing the joke: Maron says
a friend heard it, and thought it was hysterical but that he could never tell
it. Maron then tells us what happened the first time he told it before an
audience…and how in a very weird way, he thought he was getting a sign that his
former girlfriend wasn’t entirely approving of it.
Maron, like Maher,
is vehemently against the idea of children and having children, but unlike
Maher whose attitude seems to come out of sure misanthropy and his desire to
remain a life-long bachelor, Maron has enough self-awareness to know that he
just can’t do it. He admits that he has a void and that there’s no way a kid
could fill it. He also points out that he’s had two wives but no kids, and that
both his wives clearly agreed with him at the end. (He actually says that once
one of them said: “You think I’m bringing kids into this?”)
Maron’s perspective
when it comes to other people having children is based in this measure of
cynicism. In what is arguably the comic highpoint of the special, he talks
about just how insane it was that during Covid so many couples decided to have
babies. “In five years, those kids are going to want answers,” he tells his
audience and then delivers what he refers to as a one-act play in which a
parent of one such child tells everything leading up to the circumstances of
the conception of that kid and very likely how that relationship ending. I guarantee
you in a few years conversations of that nature are going to be held in houses across
the world.
But the part that
truly resonated with me and made me laugh the hardest was when Maron talks
about the fact that he owns three cats and how his friends with kids talk about
him and his cats:
“I love these cats.
These cats are my friends! And in the best case scenario, I’m going to have them
all killed!...And I knew that going in, that’s how big my heart is!”
Maron, of course,
has gotten to what everybody who has ever owned a pet knows when they adopt
them but forgets until they start getting old. Of course, being Maron he takes
it to a place that is almost too far even for his audience to go. (I wouldn’t dream
of giving it away.)
Watching From Bleak
to Dark I could not help but compare Maron to Maher, however unfair that may be. Maher, of course, is entirely a political
comedian while Maron’s for the past thirty years had been almost entirely
observational. That said, both men are white cis male comics with an extremely
bitter and cynical view towards humanity that has gotten worse over time.
But it’s hard not
to watch a special like this and not see Maron as the superior comedian for a
very critical reason. For almost all of Maher’s career, his cynicism comes from
a place of smugness and the certainty that the world would be better if they
just listened to him. Maron has never been naïve enough to believe that. He knows
he is flawed; his comedy has self-awareness as to just how broken he is. He won’t
let go of his bitterness, but even he admits that’s his problem, not anyone else’s.
And unlike Maher, he has a very clear idea of just how cruel the world can be
to you.
That may be the
biggest difference between Maher and Maron. He knows that happiness is a possibility
with another person, even if he has not been lucky enough to either find it or
in the case of Lynn Shelton, have it snatched from him. He spent much of his
act telling us that he has a void that goes back generations and that is true,
but his act has compassion and warmth, no matter how hard he tries to bury it
under his cynical veneer. He admits that things can get dark for him at times
(that’s actually the last two minutes of the special) but it’s a darkness he is
capable of facing. Watching From Bleak to Dark, I can’t help but think
of how these two comics started out and that it was the wrong man who shot to
stardom first.
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