“I think if Hitler were alive today, he’d probably appear on Theo Von’s podcast,” Marc Maron jokes toward the end of his new HBO special, Panicked. He then proceeds to imitate a half-baked, drawling Von, archbishop of the dudebro podcaster, softballing questions about drug use to a hypothetical Hitler. “On our podcast,” he snarks in an earlier moment, “we can bravely speak power to truth, now that truth can no longer defend itself.”
When Maron announced he was ending his long-running, highly influential interview show WTF With Marc Maron, it might have seemed surprising that the comic was giving up his hard-won platform. But while the podcast’s relevance had faded, a recent take-no-prisoners press tour raised Maron’s profile again. In something like a political and cultural crusade, Maron has been explicitly calling out comedians, from stand-up comics to podcast bros, for ushering in the current era of fascism.
“Under the umbrella of ‘anti-woke,’ we’ve lost a tremendous amount of democratic-leaning ideas and movements,” he told a visibly displeased Howie Mandel on his YouTube podcast Howie Mandel Does Stuff. Mandel countered that comedians didn’t have that much power.
“Are you fucking out of your mind?” Maron shot back.
Maron continually insists that comedy drives politics, and that the current long era of “anti-woke” comedy has actively helped shift political tides to the far right. In his view, comedians and podcasters aren’t just straying from their lanes. They’re dumbing down and overtaking comedy itself — and that comedy is then shifting our cultural norms into something ugly and dangerous.
Maron’s focus is clearly on larger cultural shifts. But it’s also worth asking: is he right about the state of comedy?
Maron has always leaned left, but it’s been a while since he’s been this outspoken
Like many of the current biggest names in podcasting, Maron’s career begins and ends in stand-up work. After watching the ascent of colleagues in the East Village alt scene like Louis C.K. and Sarah Silverman, he became a regular on the left-leaning Air America radio network, which launched in 2004 as a counterbalance to conservative talk radio of the era. While Air America ultimately floundered, Maron used his built-in leftist network audience to kickstart a pivot into what was then the niche arena of podcasting.
When WTF started in 2009, it was the first major interview podcast on the scene; The Joe Rogan Experience began just three months later. Although it took a while for podcasting on the whole to become the ubiquitous phenomenon it is today, Maron himself quickly gained a reputation as a surprisingly intimate interviewer, praised both for having a wide range of guests and for extracting, both from them and from himself, rare levels of emotional honesty.
While Maron never exactly shied away from political topics when they came up — the comic Gallagher walked out of Maron’s garage studio when Maron confronted him about making racist and homophobic jokes — he consciously avoided making his show a political show. Still, over the years, as politics subsumed American culture, Maron himself became more and more fed up, largely with his fellow comedians.
Following comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s disastrous appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where he spewed a litany of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic jokes, Maron made a lengthy blog post on his own website. In it, he condemned “the combination of blatant racist fear mongering and the anti-woke movement” that far-right leaders were using to gain cultural and political power.
“The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote. “When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism. When someone uses their platform for that reason they are facilitating anti-American sentiment and promoting violent autocracy.”
Popular podcasts, he wrote, “may be in the position to become part of the media oligarchy under the new anti-democratic government.” Maron was clearly responding to the role podcasters like Von — and their casual, jocular sitdowns with Trump and his allies — were already playing in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
All of this makes the timing of Maron’s decision to quit his own podcast seem significant, especially when combined with his subsequent recrimination tour. “We’re burnt out,” he told his audience in June when he broke the news that WTF would be ending. But if Maron was exhausted by the daily grind of podcast production, he’s clearly still invested in the state of comedy.
And he hasn’t stopped talking about his disenchantment with it since.
Marc Maron keeps insisting comedy is no longer good. Is he right?
At the bullseye of Maron’s comedy dartboard sits Joe Rogan. Though the two men ascended in tandem as reigning kings of podcasting, ideologically they occupy very different spaces. (It’s worth noting that Rogan and Maron have each been guests on one another’s shows in the past — though not lately.)
In recent months, Maron has repeatedly called out Rogan’s cultural influence, criticizing him and his podcasting community not only for platforming extremism, but for dumbing down the standards for “good” comedy.
To Mandel and his co-host Jackelyn Shultz, Maron suggested that, previously, comedians “could disarm fears, they could elevate your perception of things,” he said. “They had the power through humor to make you see the world differently.”
He contrasts that to “hackneyed” jokes about trans people and other topics that stand-up comics canvass purely for shock value. By normalizing comedy’s one “don’t” — punching down — Rogan and his fellows have, per Maron, whitewashed bullying and attacking marginalized groups who then become the real-world targets of discrimination and legalized persecution. The culture of shit-talking is “nothing but destructive,” he told Mandel.
And it’s worse than mean, it’s hack comedy. A hack isn’t just someone who tries to shock you; the hack is someone who can’t shock you, because you already know exactly where the joke is going to go. Hack comedy becomes its own dead end. On a recent episode of Bad Friends, Maron made this point bluntly about Rogan and the Austin comedy scene over which he presides. At some point, Maron observed, after you’ve punched down so often, there’s nothing left to punch down against.
It’s an interesting way to approach the conversation. While Maron is open about the political ramifications of this kind of comedy, making his complaints about comedy craft allows him to avoid engaging in debates about the ideology behind this kind of rhetoric.
Where he does get more explicitly political is in dissecting the “anti-woke” discourse itself. Citing the army of comedians from Rogan to Dave Chappelle who have lined up in recent years to decry cancel culture as an attack on free speech, Maron argues that the widespread comedy debate over this was a misdirect from the issues people really needed to be alarmed about.
“It wasn’t a free speech problem,” he told Mandel. “It was that people were getting cultural pushback.”
Maron has felt plenty of pushback himself, both over the aforementioned Theo Von joke and because of his comments about Rogan, which led to what some fans have called “a meltdown” in the comedy community. Maron was quick to point out the irony.
“I do think on some level that if [the anti-woke comedians are] all about free speech, and they have a sense of humor, and you’re supposed to be able to man up and take it, then if it’s funny, fuck it,” he told The Endless Honeymoon Podcast.
Maron’s larger beef might just be with, well, everyone
One of Maron’s recurring complaints is a common one: Podcasting, once praised as a democratized space, has now become too democratized.
To Mandel, Maron griped that the podcasting world has “obviously become oversaturated, and nobody ever shuts up.” The death of the monoculture and the oversaturation of podcasts about every conceivable topic, from every conceivable influencer, now leads to content that “means nothing.” While the explosion in podcasts has led to more freedom for more people, “that doesn’t mean that that’s a good thing,” he told the hosts.
Even more destructive? The algorithm.
“There are comics doing a minute of crowd work,” Maron pointed out, referring to the recent trend of stand-ups — think Matt Rife — looking to go viral through short, TikTok-ready moments. “Chasing these clicks with no craft, no sense of originality, because all they care about is this immediate sense of relevance.”
Maron laments the careers of comedians like Maria Bamford, who he recently asserted might be one of the greatest comics ever on Vulture’s Good One podcast. But he framed that conversation as being less about Bamford and more about “tribalized” comic fans — the Roganites — who are too small-minded to get her comedy.
So, if Maron sees podcasting as the haven of comedy and comedy as leaning worryingly toward sameness, why exactly is he giving up his own platform that he refers to as “for sensitive, creative people?” By setting himself and Rogan up with an either/or dichotomy, he plays into the false idea that without WTF, the Roganverse will be the only thing left. It’s a limited view of the podcasting space, but it does fit Maron’s whole doom-and-gloom vibe.
“You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism,” he tells his audience in Panicked, looking to share the blame. He refers to progressives as “buzzkills.” He knows that a dim view of absolutely everything necessarily has its limitations. That’s true even when it comes to comedy.
While he’s spent most of this press tour railing about the Rogansphere, he’s also sidestepped talking about the hugely popular comedy podcasts — heavy hitters like Las Culturistas and Good Hang With Amy Poehler, as well as up-and-coming shows like Caleb Hearon’s So True — that would never claim to be anti-woke. He doesn’t seem to be taking into account the litany of comedians whose recent specials explore a broad range of comedic storytelling and structure — exactly the kinds of things Maron says he’s missing. There are plenty of funny people out there who have never claimed to be free speech warriors; who are interested in the craft and future of being funny in public.
Maron’s aware of these entities. He recently appeared on Conan O’Brien’s mega-popular podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend — an avowedly apolitical show that happens to have featured Michelle Obama three times — and had Las Culturistas co-host Bowen Yang on one of the final episodes of his own show.
He’s also not wrong that there has been a serious shift in the comedy world, with a rise in pandering, bro-y comedy after nearly two decades in which the alt scene paradoxically reigned. A sign that says “THE END IS NEAR” gets a lot more focus and attention than one that says, “Complicated and unsettling shifts in American thought are being actively reflected in my sector of the entertainment-industrial complex, and that worries me!”
Doom and gloom has its place, especially these days, but there is still some light to be found in comedy.
