Since 2009, comedian Marc Maron has recorded his topical and entertaining podcast WTF from his garage studio, interviewing famous people such as Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman and former President Barack Obama.
Before talking to comedian John Mulaney on his latest episode, the podcast pioneer broke the news that he's calling it quits.
"We have put up a new show every Monday and Thursday for almost 16 years and we're tired. We're burnt out. And we are utterly satisfied with the work we've done," he told his listeners.
The WTF With Marc Maron Podcast has produced more than 1,600 episodes and boasts 55 million listens every year. It's one of the most-streamed and downloaded podcasts around.
Maron began the podcast with producer Brendan McDonald in 2009 after losing the late night radio show he co-hosted at Air America Radio network, whose opening line of every episode was, "Good evening geniuses, philosopher kings and queens, working class heroes, progressive utopians with no sense of humor, lurking conservatives."
At the time, the podcast genre was new.
"No one knew what a podcast was. I was coming out of a horrendous divorce. I was wanting to figure out how to continue living my life. Things were not looking good for me," he explained on WTF. "There was no way to make money. There was no way that we knew how to build an audience or anything. And it was crazy. We were doing it in a garage at the beginning. That was just a garage. It was filled with junk."
WTF with Marc Maron grew a huge audience, gained sponsors and became influential. In 2010, Robin Williams spoke to Maron about suicide before his death. That episode was inducted into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry, which noted that "Marc Maron's popularity has helped to legitimize the podcast as a media format and created an idiosyncratic document of this moment of American culture."
His 2015 interview with Barack Obama was noted by The New York Times as "almost certainly the first time that a sitting president has recorded an interview in a comedian's garage."
With Maron in his Los Angeles garage and McDonald producing from Brooklyn, the two-man operation "had a great run, but it's time, folks. It's time," Maron said. "WTF is coming to an end. And it's our decision."
The podcast will end "sometime in the fall," and Maron says it doesn't mean he won't do another podcast. The 61-year-old author of The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah and Attempting Normal has been busy acting. He starred in the Netflix series GLOW, as well as in his IFC series Maron. He has also had his own standup comedy specials and movie roles, including Joker (2019), Respect (2021) and The Bad Guys (2022).
This week, he has a new Apple show, Stick, with Owen Wilson, and next week the Tribeca Film Festival will premiere a documentary about him, Are We Good? The film explores how Maron's life changed after the death of his partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, in 2020.
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