Marc Maron

Marcus David Maron (born September 27, 1963) is an American stand-up comedian, podcaster, writer, actor, and musician. In the 1990s and 2000s, Maron was a frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman and has appeared more than forty times on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, more than any other stand-up comedian. He hosted Comedy Central's Short Attention Span Theater from 1993 to 1994, replacing Jon Stewart 

He was also a regular guest on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and hosted the short-lived 2002 American version of the British game show Never Mind the Buzzcocks on VH1. He was a regular on the left-wing radio network Air America from 2004 to 2009, hosting The Marc Maron Show and co-hosting Morning Sedition and Breakroom Live.

In September 2009, soon after Breakroom Live was canceled, Maron began hosting the twice-weekly podcast WTF with Marc Maron, where he interviews comedians, authors, musicians, and celebrities in his garage in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Highlights include a 2010 episode with Louis C.K. that was rated the No. 1 podcast episode of all time by Slate magazine, a 2012 interview with comedian Todd Glass in which Glass publicly revealed that he was gay, and a 2015 interview with President Barack Obama.

From 2013 to 2016, he starred in his own IFC television comedy series, Maron, for which he also served as executive producer and an occasional writer. From 2017 to 2019, he co-starred in the Netflix comedy series GLOW. He also had a minor role in 2019's Joker and provided the voice of Mr. Snake in the DreamWorks Animation film The Bad Guys (2022).

Maron was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of mother Toby and father Barry Ralph Maron, an orthopedic surgeon. He has a younger brother, Craig. Maron is from a Jewish family, originally from Poland and Ukraine, including Drohobych. He lived in Wayne, New Jersey, until he was six. Maron's father joined the U.S. Air Force for two years for his medical residency in Alaska, and so Maron and his family moved there. When his father left the Air Force, he moved the family to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and started a medical practice. Maron lived in Albuquerque from third grade through high school. He graduated from Highland High School.

In 1986, Maron graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English literature. Maron first performed stand-up in 1987 when he was 24 years old. His professional comedy career began at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles, where he became an associate of Sam Kinison. He later moved to New York City and became part of the New York alternative comedy scene. During the summer of 1994, he appeared several times on Monday open-mic night, coordinated by Tracey Metzger, at the now-closed Greenwich Village location of the Boston Comedy Club. 

He auditioned unsuccessfully for the 1995 Saturday Night Live cast overhaul and attributes being passed over to being high during a meeting with show creator and producer Lorne Michaels. Maron continued to be a stand-up comedian and also began to appear on television; his voice was used in episodes of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, and he hosted Short Attention Span Theater for a time. 

He also recorded half-hour specials for HBO and Comedy Central Presents, as well as comedy showcases like the Cam Neely Foundation fundraiser, which also featured performers such as Jon Stewart, Denis Leary, and Steven Wright. He frequently appeared in the live alternative stand-up series he had organized with Janeane Garofalo called Eating It, which used the rock bar Luna Lounge in New York's Lower East Side as its venue from the 1990s until the building was razed in 2005.

His first one-man show, Jerusalem Syndrome, had an extended off-Broadway run in 2000 and was released in book form in 2001. In 2009, he began workshopping another one-man show, Scorching the Earth. According to Maron (in Scorching The Earth), these two shows "bookend" his relationship with his second wife, comic Mishna Wolff, which ended in a bitter divorce.