Marc Maron by Seth Olenick

Veteran stand-up comic Marc Maron is the most intriguing interviewer in the comedy world today. His revealing conversations with the hottest talents in comedy, many of whom he’s known for decades, are marked by an unprecedented emotional depth. Maron delves into both the often never-before-revealed inner lives of his celebrity subjects, and the very nature of what it means to live a comedian’s life.

On his podcast, WTF with Marc Maron (wtfpod.com), Maron has interviewed two comedians a week, without fail, since September 2009. By mid-July of this year, WTF was not only the most popular comedy podcast in the world, but the #1 podcast on iTunes overall, with 400,000-450,000 downloads per week.

Whether speaking with A-listers such as Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow, Conan O’Brien, and Robin Williams, or comics you’re learning about for the first time on his podcast, Maron’s conversations are marked by an intimacy that late night TV banter simply cannot match. Maron reveals as much about himself as he does his guests – occasionally airing, and settling, long-simmering resentments as he goes – and often persuades his subjects to expound on previously off-limit topics, such as when both Williams and Carlos Mencia addressed, both for the first time ever in public, their long-time reputations as joke thieves.

We spoke to Maron about how WTF came to be, some of his more revealing encounters, and his unique and fascinating approach to the art of the interview.

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Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Photo by Michael Yarish/Comedy Central.

South Park has been on the air for fifteen years, and in that time, there’s almost no sacred subject – from abortion to Islam to making Jesus Christ a character on the show – that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone haven’t torn to shreds. We spoke with the pair about the show’s pleasures and challenges, and the role that rebellion and iconoclasm play in its creation.

How did the premise for “South Park,” and then its four main characters, come about?

Trey Parker: I was in an animation class in college, and I was always into the Terry Gilliam-style of animation. So I was making a film for class, and the idea was, I’ll just make it really crude – like, Terry Gilliam style, but I’ll even make it look like a kid did it, and do it with construction paper and glue and scissors. And it got a really big response. So Matt and I would do tons of three-minute films, joke sketches we would do on film, and we were talking one day about how if we cut out mouths, we could actually put different shapes on each mouth and then lip sync to it. We always had these voices we did as kids, swearing at each other and stuff, so we recorded the voices onto a four-track recorder, and we just sped them up. And we were like, it kinda sounds like kids! The student screening of films at the end of every semester was basically a Christmas screening, so we were like, let’s do a fucked-up Christmas thing. So we created these four boys, did their voices, and did this whole thing where they’re building Frosty [the Snowman] and it comes to life. So they go to get Jesus, and he kills Frosty, and they realize at the end that Christmas really isn’t about all this, it’s just about presents. And it was really just this fucked-up thing we wanted to try, sitting there with this overhead [projector], click, click, move the construction paper, click, click, put on a different mouth. It was super crude, and it got a big response. The “Spirit of Christmas” story most people have heard was really “The Spirit of Christmas, Part II.” We did that later. This was really the very first creation of it.

Did you base the four main characters on anyone specific?

TP: Just us, basically.

Matt Stone: And then a fat kid and a poor kid. That was kind of it.

As the characters evolved, did you base certain characteristics on anyone, or did they evolve organically?

MS: There’s parts of Cartman that have taken on the traits of some of our friends over the years. Just little bits, like, one friend has this little expression, etc. And I guess Trey is Stan, and I’m kinda Kyle. They have our traits a little more, maybe. Butters started because I was making fun of our animation director, who we call Butters. Mr. Garrison is based on this college professor.

TP: A lot of the time, a character is based on two or three different people.

MS: But the voice is one thing, and the drawing’s another.

How did you decide which one of you would do which voice?

TP: When it started out, there was no difference between Stan and Kyle. By the second short film, we were like, let’s make Kyle a Jew. That was the complaint about them when the show first came out, that Stan and Kyle were really similar, and they sounded kinda the same, and were just kinda the same kid. There’s nuance between them now after fifteen years, but they’re still two best friends who share a lot of the same thinking, and talk the same way.

When we hear them now, do we hear the voices exactly as you record them, or are they sped up?

TP: They’re digitally sped up.

What’s the division of labor between the two of you, and how has that changed over the years?

TP: In a lot of ways, it’s the same. It started as just the two of us making each other laugh, doing the voices back to each other and stuff like that. At the heart of what we do, that’s still what it is.

MS: Trey still directs every episode. I deal a little more with the business stuff, but the real meat of it is the two of us in that writer’s room, trying to come up with ideas.

You’ve amazed people at times by commenting on news events just days after they occur, starting with the Elian Gonzalez episode. How do you do that, and how do you decide when that should be done? 

MS: We can do it because we do the show in six days. So if something happens on Saturday, we can react to it in our show that airs on Wednesday. But there’s a flip side to that. With Elian Gonzalez, that was great, because we had that iconic image. Instead of having to get into the issue, we just made fun of that image of the guy with the gun. But the problem with doing really topical stuff is that we’re also within the news cycle – like, something else could come out the day after we do the episode that makes it like, oh, we didn’t know, and then we’re on the wrong side of it. So we don’t do it that often. We do it less often than people think we do, because it resonates so hard when we do it. We did it when they killed Saddam, and when they killed Osama.

TP: But what’s crazy in that episode was, we had the episode eighty percent done, and we were like, oh, we can put a little reference to that in. But then people were like, oh, did you see what they were saying in the show. It was this whole metaphor for Osama bin Laden. And we’re like, no. It wasn’t.

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Yesterday was my birthday. I had planned on spending an intimate evening at home with my assistant, Ricardo, and my favorite DVD treat, Ben Hur, while my Chinaman, Ming, kept my glass refilled with sloe gin fizz.

My plans, however, were ABORTED, when the television froze on the E! network. The channel wouldn’t change, and as I shouted at Ming to unplug the TV, he electrocuted himself from having gin fizz on his hands and died within five seconds. Then Ricardo screamed and ran out. I chased after him, catching my foot and twisting my ankle inside the mouth of my panther-skin rug, and fell facing the television in a state of complete paralysis, forced to watch a marathon of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Well, HAPPY F***ING BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!!!!

I lay there for 12 hours, powerless to stop watching these parasites of humanity, these blithering retards, these insipid, vapid, asinine dipshits coo about the most BORING topics imaginable, and fantasized about how nice it would be to be waterboarded, or to find myself in a shark attack.

Mmmmm, so soothing.

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In the mid-1970s, the team often referred to as ZAZ — brothers David and Jerry Zucker and their friend Jim Abrahams — ran a popular comedy theater in Los Angeles called the Kentucky Fried Theater. 

The more they performed there, the more they came to hate the sound of silence.

“We never wanted to endure silence. That’s where the pace came from — everything was either a joke, or a set-up to a joke,” says David Zucker, explaining the same pace of rapid-fire jokes that would later make their 1980 film, Airplane, which finally debuted on Blu-ray in September, one of the greatest comedies of all time.

“We learned that it was easier to keep an audience laughing than to start them up from scratch, just keeping that rhythm of jokes on jokes on jokes.” READ MORE >>

Name: GRACKIE

Age: Shut up

Occupation: Between jobs

WHO ARE YOU WEARING?
A mix of designers, but mostly God.

WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR SHOES?
Dog Poop & Cabanna. Hahahahaha! Just kidding. Key Foods. They have a lot of great stuff there.

HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE YOUR
PERSONAL STYLE?
Bohemian chic meets dystopian nightmare. I have a few standard pieces that can go with anything — like my jars of urine — and then I mix them with trendier items, like cat litter. I keep it simple. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Have you seen Ringo????!?!?!!! He has my eyes! READ MORE >>

1. Cut up one breast of chicken (one pound), being careful not to accidentally slit your wrists with the knife as it would likely be days before anyone found the body.
2. Bring a pan to medium heat. After two minutes, cover the bottom of the pan with a thin layer of cooking oil. No need for anything fancy, like olive oil. It’s just you there.
3. Sprinkle the chicken with some pre-made lemon pepper seasoning you got at the local Gristedes. Season to your own taste. In fact, feel free to just drench the chicken in salt. Who cares what happens to your heart? Maybe it would have been better if you had accidentally cut your wrists open during step one. What’s the goddamn point?
4. Cook the chicken in the pan on medium heat for about eight minutes on each side. You should probably use a different fork for flipping the chicken while cooking it than you use for eating it later, but who really gives a damn. You live alone. For a moister chicken, cover the pan.
5. Add some seasoned rice or a salad or some other boring, god-awful mess as a side. Garnish your salad with olives, carrots, grape tomatoes, and regrets
6. (1 quart).
7. Ta-da! You have the chicken and side dish you deserve. And SURPRISE! This much chicken actually serves two, so it will be more than enough to feed you for two equally miserable days.

Not enough time to read? Try these TWO-IN-ONE BOOKS! One classic and one contemporary title, combined into one piece of easy-to-digest literature! Here are some excerpts:

A Mark Twain classic and Peter Benchley’s most famous work are merged into:

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY JAWS

The great fish moved slowly beneath the raft. It wasn’t used to the Mississippi, but it knew a big juicy leg when it saw one dangling twenty feet above it. It homed in and bit off the leg, just below the knee.

African-American Jim felt something tug at his leg. “Oh, Lawdy,” he said. “I’s-a gwyne to bleed all over dis ribber. Can we goes ashore fo’ a minute?”

“Sheriff Brody done closed the beaches,” said Huck, taking a major hit off his corncob pipe.

Huck was being hit in the face with the gushing flow from Jim’s stump. “Jim, you know I don’t like being sprayed with arterial blood. Honest Injun.”

Jim put his mangled limb back in the murky Mississippi, creating a “chum” effect. The shark rose up out of the water, opened its daggered mouth and hung there.

Jim sputtered, “I think we’s a-gwyne to need a bigger raft.” READ MORE >>

GoggleProtector

When extremely drunk, hold phone up to the face of potential sex partners to learn how badly one might be “beer goggling.” App analyzes proportionality of facial features, uniformity of complexion, and weight, visually compensating for low light, cigarette smoke, and how long it is past 2:00 a.m.

FlickDitcher

An app that tells you how bad a movie is by having you wave your iPhone over the film’s newspaper ad. Presence of slogans like, “Sometimes Love Hurts More Than Hate”; ambiguous, cut-and-pasted review snippets like “…definitely, without a doubt…a movie…this year”; or the presence in the cast of any actor from Friends causes your phone to block the film’s listings, GPS directions to theaters where it’s playing, and owner’s ability to enter any screening of the film, thanks to integration with new iElectricShock app. READ MORE >>

Flaco Navaja, Cameron Ocasio, D.C. Benny

In July, I was offered the role of Plaxico Diamond Philips, a giant Mexican who wears Daisy Duke cutoffs, in Love Magical, an independent film about a socially awkward white guy who wants to be an R&B songwriter — basically, Rocky with thrift shop espadrilles. I figured the footwear alone would make us a shoo-in at Cannes.

The film’s budget came through a friend of the writer’s who reached out to Greek diner owners in Queens, securing funds as well as daily deliveries of gyros with tzatziki sauce. We also got some frothy product placement from a high-level brand: Colt 45 Malt Liquor.

There were exotic locations, from a side street in Chinatown to a brownstone in Carroll Gardens where no one was allowed to touch anything, and even a celebrity star: ’90s R&B legend Keith Sweat, playing the role of Delonte Skywalker, a fictional ’90s R&B legend. READ MORE >>

Kyle Montover had just left his luxurious condominium in the care of his two cats, Cat and Sir Merryweather; and his two butlers, whom he just collectively dubbed “the butlers.” Not caring a jot for the long-term future, he was, at this very moment, absorbed in the most perplexing of short-term dilemmas: how to break it to his Coppertone-darkened, platinum-blonde paramour, Patricia, that their year together had been all sorts of joy, but now he was off to thinner and younger pastures. While he was in the midst of unlocking a rational solution to this quandary, he crossed the street and was subsequently crushed by a bus.

“SHIT! BUS!” was his final thought.  READ MORE >>