WTF? No--WTF! The Marc Maron show hits Phoenix
Popular podcaster returns to his comedy club roots
HARK!
I hear…a comedy powerhouse…
Fueled by a popular podcast, Marc Maron is one of the biggest names in comedy, these days. He’s traveling the country and beyond, playing the likes of the Rialto Theatre in Tucson, the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado, Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, Queen Elizabeth Theater in Toronto and the Bloomsbury Theatre in London.
Big, fancy places for his WTF Podcast Tour.
So how the heck did the relatively tiny Stand Up Live Phoenix land Maron?
He plays here in the Valley at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17; as of Wednesday, tickets were still available, for a relatively low $35 (click here for tix).
Marc Maron is on the way
For comparison purposes, Stand Up Live Phoenix hosts Mark Viera Friday and Saturday (9:45 p.m., after Maron’s show). His credits include Comedy Central’s Russell Simmons Presents Stand-Up at the El Rey and his own Showtime special Tales of Nuyorican.
Sunday, the downtown venue gives the mic to Liz Miele, who has appeared on Comedy Central, FOX, AXS TV, Hulu, and NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. Next Thursday, up-and-coming comic Eric Neumann, fresh off his late night debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, is featured at Stand Up Live.
Good, solid talent–but nothing like Maron.
Starting his career in the Nineties on the traditional standup-to–TV route, Maron was a frequent guest on The Late Show with David Letterman and has appeared more than forty times on Late Night with Conan O'Brien (more than any other stand-up comedian).
In the early 2000s, he hosted a syndicated radio show.
When that was canceled, he had one thought: WTF?
That became the title of a twice-weekly podcast he launched in 2009, putting him way ahead of the current podcast wave. On his pod, he interviews comedians, authors, musicians, and celebrities in his garage in Highland Park, Los Angeles. His 2010 interview of Louis C.K. was rated the No. 1 podcast episode of all time by Slate magazine; another classic was his 2015 interview with President Barack Obama. And as differing celebrities such as the late Robin Williams and Keith Richards joined Maron in his garage.
From 2013 to 2016, he starred in his own IFC television comedy series, Maron, and from 2017 to 2019 he co-starred in the Netflix comedy series GLOW. And you may have seen him in movies like 2019's Joker.
Meanwhile, his podcast averages 6 million downloads per month. Click here to listen to his pods.
“How are you, What the Fuckers? What the Fuck buddies? What the Fuckniks?” he begins his shows.
In the last month, his subjects have ranged from documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen to actress Christina Ricci to fellow comic Patton Oswalt.
Getting back to standup comedy, Maron delivers riffs on such subjects as “There are two types of morning people,” in which he talks about the typical morning radio show.
On a 2020 Netflix special, he compared health supplements and vitamins to people trying to move drugs, dragging trainers along the way: “the guy who wanted to do something else with this life…most trainers, wasn’t their life goal. They had other plans. The team didn’t work out. They didn’t make the team. They were at the gym anyway. That wasn’t the big plan for them, they ended up there.”
A quarter century ago, a clean-cut Maron made his first appearance on Letterman’s show. He made a joke about cops pulling out guns at a store; he was on the payphone in front–but didn’t hang up. “It might get loud in a second here…”
So–from payphone jokes to podcasting, it’s been quite a run, for Marc Maron. Pretty fitting he’ll be back cracking jokes at the type of snug comedy club where he launched his career, making his mark at the legendary Comedy Store in LA in the late 1980s.