He never prepared a list of questions – still doesn’t – preferring instead to embrace the tangential detours of a more natural one-to-one. I was doing something I wanted to do and it filled a big hole in me of fear and insecurity.” He found that he enjoyed the new medium: “I was proud of myself for the first time in my life. Maron proved to be a free-ranging, easy-mannered conversationalist, unafraid to speak about his own vulnerabilities in order to get more from his guests. He turned his garage into a studio and started approaching friends for interviews. “I got into the podcast because I didn’t know what to do with myself and I was going broke,” Maron says. He was, by his own admission, bitter, sad and resentful. Despite a fairly healthy standup career (Maron held the record for most guest spots on the talkshow Late Night With Conan O’Brien), he had witnessed contemporaries such as Sarah Silverman and Louis CK become more successful than him. At the time, he had just been fired from his job on a liberal talk-radio station and was going through a costly divorce after the failure of his second marriage.
#PODCASTER MARON FREE#
How did Maron, a 51-year-old, twice-divorced, childless standup comedian with late-90s indie hipster facial hair and a penchant for lumberjack shirts, come to be interviewing the leader of the free world in his garage? To understand that, you have to go back to 2009, the year he started the WTF podcast: a twice-weekly encounter with fellow comedians, actors and directors. “Getting around that would be challenging.” “I knew that he would have a narrative on almost everything,” says Maron. He was worried, too, that his usual interview style – an intimate, conversational shooting of the breeze which relies on an upfront emotional connection – would not work on a media-trained public figure practised at politely dodging uncomfortable questions.
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