WAITING FOR THE PUNCH

A popular podcast gets the book treatment.

An accomplished and long-respected comedian, Maron is perhaps best known for his wildly popular eponymous podcast WTF with Marc Maron, which premiered in 2009. Throughout the podcast’s successful run, Maron has shown a unique knack for getting famous (and semifamous) people to talk. And talk. As they talk, his guests reveal amazing—and often previously unexplored—depths about their personal experiences. In the process, they also reveal a great deal about life in general, especially the many difficulties in navigating all the absurdity, drama, and tragicomedy. Maron did the majority of the work to get these words out there, as they are drawn from his podcast, but he strongly implies that the transcription was someone else’s job. It is unclear who made perhaps the most important decision of all: organizing these transcriptions by theme. The book coalesces around chapters about such timeless themes as family, sex, addiction, mortality, and success and failure. Many of Maron’s subjects are among his professional colleagues and friends—among dozens of others, Robin Williams, Judd Apatow, Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon, Garry Shandling, Kevin Hart, Cheech Marin, Sarah Silverman—but he has interviewed a wide range of people from other walks of life, including Terry Gross, Melissa Etheridge, David Sedaris, Paul Thomas Anderson, and even then-President Barack Obama. As readers will expect, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but what is more surprising and refreshing is how many profound and powerful insights Maron manages to draw from his guests. Many of the most tragic situations come from the comedians, and some of the funnier moments come from those whose job is not necessarily to make people laugh.

An insightful collection of interviews about what it means to be human. This book, it turns out, helps explain W is TF.