Backstage’s profile of WTF with Marc Maron is laid out according to AA’s twelve steps program espoused by AA, which seems just the right amount of pathology to keep Maron up all night at the cat ranch. “The whole process has been about me evolving and becoming a better person, and more self-accepting, and more creative,” Maron says about kicking off his podcast in September 2009. “You can see that in the arc of the show.” The article also details Maron’s time Air America, and the stinging irony of being referred to as a comedy “veteran” while tickets to his shows gathered dust in the box office. Luckily Maron cites WTF not only as a way to “reintegrate myself into the community, change my peers’ attitudes about me as well as my own attitudes about myself,” but as a deeply cathartic creative project as well, particularly helpful as someone who wears his neurotic heart on his sleeves. Says interviewee Ira Glass, “Marc is an insanely intense guy, and stares into you as you talk—it really feels like his eyes are piercing inside you—and then when he speaks he reaches inside himself and talks in the most heartfelt way possible. In a room with that, you’d have to be made of stone not to respond in the most soulful way you can summon up.” Explains Maron, “If people become a fan of mine because of the podcast they know me in a very real and intimate way. It is the purest I’ve ever been, in any medium, and I bring that to the stage.”
