I’ve been a fan of Marc Maron’s work for many years. His podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, was my go-to entertainment when I spent hours of my day sitting in L.A. traffic. I’ve seen him perform live, have loved his work as an actor, and found his Covid-era Instagram Live videos to be a welcome distraction from the pandemic.
Of course, anyone who has followed Maron for a while knows that in 2020, just a few months into lockdown, his girlfriend, Lynn Shelton, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. His grief, which he openly shared on Instagram and the podcast, was palpable. But Maron’s a comedian, and it was only natural that he would find the humor in even the most difficult situations. In 2023, he addressed Shelton’s passing, along with many other challenging topics, in his HBO comedy special, From Bleak to Dark.
Prior to the special’s premiere, I chatted with him over Zoom about Shelton’s death, the state of stand-up comedy, and why getting an HBO special was a dream come true. It was a fantastic chat—I was beyond thrilled when he said his standard sign-off, “Good talking to you,” which I’d heard him say hundreds of times on WTF—but some of our conversation was cut from the final piece in Shondaland due to space limitations.
In honor of my recent interview with director Steven Feinartz and the premiere of his film Are We Good?, which documents Maron’s life and career in the aftermath of Shelton’s death, I’m sharing my 2023 conversation with Maron in its entirety here. Enjoy!
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SANDRA EBEJER: How are you doing?
MARC MARON: Okay. You?
Good. Thanks for doing this. I know you’ve got back-to-back interviews all day.
It’s okay. My pleasure.
I’m a big fan. I really enjoyed the HBO special. Congratulations.
Oh, thank you.
Obviously, given the title From Bleak to Dark, you’re talking about some pretty intense subjects. Have you always used humor as a way of navigating difficult topics?
I think so. I think that from feeling awkward and uncomfortable [as a young man], I became a smart-ass. But the thing that compelled me when I was younger to be a comic was watching comedy. I just thought comedians had a handle on things, and that they could frame things in a way that made them manageable. I think that humor, if you have that particular gift, is a way to reframe almost anything—fear, sadness, anger. You can do anything with it and make those things manageable and less destructive.
The special is dedicated to the memory of your late girlfriend, Lynn Shelton. You talk about her beautifully in the piece.
Oh, thank you.
You’re obviously not the first comic to address the passing of someone in their act, but how has it been for you personally to talk about her and that experience in front of a live audience?
Well, it evolved over a long time, in the sense that I’ve been working on that material for a year and a half. As soon as we got out of Covid and back into clubs, I started working out that stuff. Initially, it was tricky because it was emotional. It’s a very fine, weird line with a lot of that material. Like, I think that the hummingbird story told with a slightly different emotional lens on it could be profoundly heartbreaking, but because of the way I structured it, you get a relief. It’s still heartbreaking, but my saving my own self from falling into a hole of paralyzing grief kind of lifts the thing up, where the four hummingbirds come back the next day. There’s these beats of release. But it became easier over time. As the routines became more structured, they found their level between emotion and humor.
In the special, they’re the way I set it up. I said a few things on the special about her that I’d never said before anywhere. I still leave a little room for myself to improvise. I don’t consciously do it, but I’m glad it happens because those for me are the best moments. But in setting up that piece, moving from the cultural commentary into that stuff, or from my dad or aging into Lynn, it was always kind of that choppy, “I’m not sure I could figure out how to talk about this.” But there’s one beat I do in there that is jarring and very old-school in its delivery. Just that that was the worst day of my life and I’m sure for her too. That line, which is right there in the logic of it, is perfect. It could seem insensitive, but I don’t know that it is.
No, you handle it really well. It’s beautifully done.
Good. Cause I worry about it. You know, when you’re a public person and the person you’re with is also a public person and they pass away, you’re sought out. You have an outlet to have this experience publicly of your grief. There’s so many more people that had much longer, deeper, and familial relationships with her that don’t have that outlet. It was interesting because a cousin of hers that I don’t know—I didn’t know her family; we weren’t together long enough for me to get dug in with them and a lot of them I met because of her death, which is horrible—reached out to me and said, “Look, you should ease up on the public grief because there’s a lot of us here who lost someone as well.”
At first, I took it personally. I thought, “Well, I’m allowed to have it.” But then I realized, “They’re kind of right, in a sense.” I am allowed to have it, but you don’t want it to flood everything, to where her ex-husband or her son are having to see me deal with this all the time when they’re dealing with their own thing. It sort of adds a weird layer to it. But that’s where the idea of knowing who the victim is came up. You know, I’m not the victim; she is, and there’s a responsibility around that.
Yeah. And if you hadn’t addressed it, it would seem odd.
Right. And absolutely, I was going to address it. But I did realize that I don’t have to take all these interviews. There were other people that knew her, and they deserve to have a voice. I can’t just hijack the space because people want content. You know what I mean? In light of that, I wonder how her people will respond to the special. I don’t stay in touch with any of them, really. It just kind of all drifted away. But it’s something that I wonder about.
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