Photo: Dmitri von Klein
In today’s WTF podcast, Marc Maron, the cover subject of our prototype print issue (which you can view as a PDF file by clicking the cover up and to the right), describes his much-anticipated guest the best way one can: “You’re Steven Wright. You’re your own planet.” What’s so gratifying and substantial about today’s podcast is that the seemingly far-off planet that is Steven Wright proves that he is indeed anything but down to Earth. Lively, personable, and uncharacteristically—for a comic, at least—positive, Wright seems like your dark-minded uncle combined with your favorite, loving aunt. Even the moat of his iconic and laconic on-stage delivery dissipates as he explains that his comedic style grew out of nervousness and, if anything, humility. This podcast makes clear that Wright isn’t a household name by accident: his enlivened recount of a niece’s dance recital with a forty-year old transgendered doctor is so brilliant that it makes listening to this podcast mandatory for any of us with an appreciation for the absurd. That said, enjoy one of Marc Maron’s best podcasts to date.
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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