Marc Maron’s Your Man, When Only an Artisanal Comic Will Do
An Entertaining, If Not Entirely Uplifting, Evening at Santa Barbara’s Lobero
We’re living in some dark days right now, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Marc Maron. How would the famously battle-scared, not exactly optimistic comedian — whose most recent HBO special was titled From Bleak To Dark — react to Donald Trump’s first days in office or the deadly fires near his home in Los Angeles, not to mention just in general how much fun it is to be a man in your 60s.
Maron addressed the herd of elephants in the room right from the get-go when he said, “I’ll try to entertain you, but I don’t have any solutions.”
And then he proceeded to do just that. Chronicling the rich progressive reaction to Trump’s immigration policies (“I don’t know, I’ve never moved my own lawn before. I’m pretty good at cleaning my own house, but I don’t know about dusting.”), and making a pretty solid argument as to why evacuating for the fire with his three somewhat feral cats and only one cat carrier ( “I usually only take one of them to the vet at a time.”) was actually more difficult than if he had three small children.
It was kind of scary how much his cynical, dour, but oh-so-funny world view reminded me of the people I hang out with. As Maron said, “It’s difficult in these times to be funny, this is what I do. I travel the country, wealthy areas, and bring it to the people.” He joked about picking up busloads of people in the middle of the country, mostly in Whole Foods parking lots. “I’m an artisanal comic — I am the farm and you are the table.”
He’s a little dark, he’s a little whiny (okay, maybe a lot of both of those things), but he owns it, and I find that strangely charming and infinitely relatable. He also had a surprisingly emotional reaction to listening to Taylor Swift’s music and confessed that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between happiness and a really, really good cup of coffee, which are both things I can also relate to.
Maron was indeed entertaining, and while he did, as promised, offer nothing in the way of solutions, his set reminded me of how much I enjoyed listening to his popular podcast. I listened quite a bit to WTF with Marc Maron (where he mostly interviews famous people and has some unique untethered conversations) during the pandemic, and after seeing Maron live, I listened to it again. This month alone, he had four of the people I saw during the Santa Barbara International Film Festival — directors Brady Corbet and James Mangold, and actors Ariana Grande and Demi Moore — and thanks to the show, it’s back in my rotation. This may not be a solution per se, but it makes me think and it makes me laugh, and that’s about as much as we can ask for from an entertainer these days.
P.S: Opening for Maron was a refreshingly eccentric set by Blair Socci, who wasn’t kidding when she said, “I look like if JonBenét had lived.” Check her out here on YouTube.
