Marcus David Maron (/ˈmærən/ MARR-ən; born September 27, 1963) is an American stand-up comedian, podcaster, writer and actor.
I'm interested in the fact that comics are people who are oddly courageous in their desire and their commitment to sacrificing any sense of normalcy in their lives, any sense of security, and most of them are oddly unique individuals. Let's have a broader conversation with people that have spent their last however-many-years thinking about their lives. I mean, they're philosophers. They're poets. They're people who are on the outside looking in at the world through a different set of values.
When I was a young comic in New York and I wasn't getting any work, I was wandering around the Lower East Side with my notebook. I would stop at the guitar place on St. Mark's and talk to that dude for a while, then I'd go to the bookstore and talk to that dude for a little while. I had a guy over at the record store, and I'd talk to him for a while. It kept me connected to life.
I'm not a moron, but science fiction to me requires a suspension of disbelief and honest curiosity or fascination in that kind of bullshit. I've just never been able to make that jump, really. I like things to be more organic.
The bile makes it better. I am an information wasting machine - 100s of words a day.
I didn't really want to kill myself, it just made me feel better to know I could if I wanted to.
I'm a guy that after having experience in radio and stuff, if I can trust the people I'm working with, I get a real thrill with working with other people who are good at what they do.
It seems people are more willing to let other people control their minds now and recreational drug use doesn't seem to have that same renegade sense of adventure that it once did.
Conversation is a beautiful thing. When I was a younger guy, just wandering around talking to people was what kept me connected to the world.
Is there any indication we shouldn't be depressed - are you living on the same planet that I am? Do you ever think that depression might be the reasonable human response to the crap we're going through as a species, meant to propel us into the next evolutionary step, or at least into taking some different course of action so we might survive? Do you ever think that maybe it's the happy people that are really screwed up in the head?
In my life, I didn't get into comedy to be - I had no business model. All I wanted to do was, basically, finish becoming myself. And you stand in front of people and be seen and heard in this format. I thought it was the most practical format for me to express whatever it was I was going through. Whatever my ideas were in my evolving philosophy about life. I obviously don't sell out theaters. I'm not a household name. I'm not incredibly consistent in terms of doing the same act over and over again, and I'm definitely working out a lot of my existential issues onstage.
It always astounds me that over the course of my career, and having lived in four comedy cities - New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles - there's very few people I haven't run into.
That's an animal fable about humility. If you survive your mistake, you must learn from it. Accept that you're fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes stupid. Realize that you're not immortal and you've got to take care of yourself. And then laugh it off and fly away.
The next evolutionary step is into the screen.
I'm not a racist. It's really case by case; it's not ethnicity specific. It's just the way I react to things that are different. I think that's normal. Everyone's nervous when they're confronted with things that they don't understand or are different. That's a normal human reaction. It doesn't become racist 'til you say things like, 'Oh, there's a lot of them. '
Whether people know the evolution of the conversation or not, I don't know, but thematically, as a comedian, I stay in the same ballpark - around my issues and my philosophy of life.
What comics sacrifice and what lives they live - I know that most of their lives, their adult lives, they're sitting around or walking around with notebooks, writing things down. Usually they're fairly sensitive. Usually they're very bright. And that makes them poets.
I think things evolve into jokes. I don't generally write them down as jokes. I talk them out.
I have a very primitive sense that if I just turn on a radio or the television, that somebody's playing that stuff for me.
My cats, the ones that I have, were feral when I found them so the relationship that I have with them 10 years in is very mutual, earned, and evolved over time. It was never an easy thing. I like that they have a certain distance and have their own sense of selves.
As I became very conscious and more aware of things I got very into the beatniks and that kind of stuff. They were very important to me for a few years.