The Iterative Method of Comedian Marc Maron - Iterate Course

Marc Maron by Larry Hirshowitz

Biography

Marc Maron is a standup comedian who has been performing honest and thought-provoking comedy for over 15 years. His entrance into the comedy world in the 80s coincided with his recognition as a member of the alternative comedy scene. This genre of comedic performance was seen as a break from the traditional structure of standup as a string of joke setups and punchlines. Though the alt comedy scene was recognized and then established, comics like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen are often cited as early influences to the scene. Since his first foray into standup Marc has appeared on countless late night programs, including a record 47 times on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.  Because of the mechanics of the alternative comedy style the comic is always in a state of self reflection and openness and assumes the same about his audience. Marc built a career around this but his personal relationships were plagued by the self-destructive side of his personality.

While in a career lull Marc conceived of a podcast using some of his learned skills from his brief stint on satellite radio to interview friends and comics in the industry about their own experience as comedians. At its core Marc’s show “WTF with Marc Maron” seeks to find the spark that makes a person want to go up in front of other people and make them laugh. In each episode, taped in the garage of his home that he refers to as “the cat ranch”, Marc attempts to divine the process that each interview subject uses to cope with the fallout of putting yourself on stage to be judged, for good or ill. Marc’s career trajectory validates the openness of the alt comedy process. In his honesty, vulnerability and analysis Marc has built a huge following and earned accolades from the likes of Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

Description of Work

Marc’s work is twofold in that I looked a both his personal recounting of his onstage style but then I also took into account his now wildly popular podcast series. In the former Marc is confident and established, although his forte is the anxiety-ridden, angry standup. His earnestness lends itself well to the alt-comedy style, a phrase that he does not understand, probably because he knows no other way to be. During our interview I was referring to his most recent standup CD “This Has To Be Funny” as template for the work he’s been doing recently. In one extended section Marc retells about a visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. In it he fluidly alternates between a structured story and genuine side tracks that seem so off the cuff that they probably are. His podcast is at once an augmentation of his own standup and something larger, a contribution to the comedy and entertainment community. His bare and honest questioning seems to create a safe space for the fears and challenges of being a comedian to be discussed.

Goals

In speaking to Marc it became apparent that he uses iteration in two different ways. In a very real way his medium is iteration itself, it is the gateway to insights he makes on stage and in his podcast. Even in his podcast Marc has general themes to which he returns in almost every interview. With established comics and newcomer interviewees alike he always returns to questions about work, process, catching the big break. In his personal life he uses his medium of comedy to iterate on his own mental state,

analyzing and reworking old and new methods to find fresh insight. From this wellspring of self analysis he came up with the idea of the interview style of podcast as a method for coping with a stalling career only to have that coping method become a major catalyst for his professional rediscovery.

Intended Outcomes

With regards to Marc’s radio and podcast career his iteration on the platform was largely driven by personal fulfillment. He never understood the alt-comedy label, perhaps because of his natural tendency towards the type of confessional, stream of consciousness style often associated with the alt-comedy scene. From our discussion it was clear that if a comedian is focused then iteration is not consciously considered because it is simply absolutely necessary in order to improve timing, word choice, and arrangement of bits. In his interviews with other successful comics it is clear that everyone deals with the iterative process differently but the discussions are always centered on the different levels of iteration performers attempt. In his interview with Robin Williams they talk about how comedy is sometimes a respite for other aspect of an entertainment career gone awry. Many of his interview subjects address this angle in different ways, how either comedy was always the intended outcome and it was a struggle or acting was the intended outcome and comedy was a respite. Regardless the intended outcome is dictated partly by the comics goals but equally by circumstance and responsiveness to their audience and where they are in their career. Marc even admitted that the podcast as a career was absolutely not an intended outcome but his openness to the momentum of his following and his skills as an interviewer and comedian resulted in a huge opportunity for new comedy and new career opportunities.

Marc’s Process

• Gather Material - Since jokes, clinically and rather broadly defined as a “thing someone says to cause amusement or laughter”, often rely on context it is important for Marc to engage with others, with anyone who has an interesting story and something to say. Even while on the road Marc travels with a notebook and on his free time before shows will go out into the town he’s in and talk to people and gather stories and experiences.

  • Observe - It is essential to creating the best interaction on stage that Marc is a sensitive and observant critic of the world around him. The ubiquity of the human emotional range and the baring of these emotional observations is what creates the performative tensions within his stage bits and his podcast monologues.

  • Analyze - Perspective, word choice, delivery, these are things that comedians workshop for their entire career. In order to arrive at the funniest and in his priorities, truest observations, Marc analyzes, re-analyzes (and perhaps over-analyzes and then analyzes his over-analysis) his observations and thoughts around those observations.

  • Decision Making - The process of deciding how funny something is is undertaken very rapidly when happening on stage in a performance. This rapidity is part of the style of alt comedy, where freshness and honesty are held at a premium. The audience is expecting a emotional communion that allows them to identify their own pithy agreement.

    • Yes, it is funny - Deciding if a joke is funny is at once a command decision by the comedian as well as a group process in conjunction with the audience.

    • No, it is not funny or it is sort of funny - Often a comedian will tell the joke anyway, if the shared process of deeming the joke funny is only confirmed by the comedian and not by the audience. In a way the audience's feedback is at once damning and reaffirming, as a topic or angle could potentially be considered roundly un-funny unless a comedian develops a unique enough voice or angle to land whatever punchline he is going for.

    • Context - Marc offered the opinion that there are two contexts for joke development, again in keeping with his style and established comedy workflows. His natural tendency is towards the more freeform, stream-of-consciousness style identified with alt comedy as a whole.

      • Classic Act Format - a classic comedy act finds its origins in vaudeville and stage theater tropes. The Classic Act incorporates brief setups and punchlines strung together by light observational humor. This process can boarder on the formulaic and yet like all good art forms, once the rules of the establishment are set, the time is then ripe for a breakthrough in genre.

      • Alternative Comedy Act - In this form comics keep a running mental or written journal of their thoughts and observations and blend them into a story arc that is part confessional, part rant, part musical act, part therapy session.

      • Use - In discussing these angles, which Marc admits are rather too cut and dry and the reality is that comics use various techniques, some formal, some improvised.

        • Failure, on stage - the feedback loop for the failure of a joke is instant: either the audience laughs or they don’t. There are gradations in between but part of the challenge as the Comedian is the determine when it is a joke that is simply not funny and when it is the audience, who perhaps might not be attuned to the context of the comedian’s jokes. Either way failure happens often in standup but is rarely discussed except amongst trusted friends.

        • Failure, in career - In a lager sense success in comedy has criteria that are largely self imposed. Marc’s constraints for success are simply that the comedian must work really really hard. Very little sustained career success in comedy is unearned and in this way failure and overcoming it is a huge part of the standup comedy equation.

Strengths + Weaknesses of Methodology

A discussion of the weakness of Marc’s process are highlighted in his most recent interview with David Cross. In it Marc and David discuss how trying new things on stage, especially when the stakes are high, is worth the possible failure because it makes you a stronger comic and a stronger person. The iteration happens right in front of the audience’s eyes. Events like open mics are a testing ground for raw material, jokes that are new and unproven and are heavily used by more polished, classical acts. But in Marc’s style of iteration this type of testing and reworking may happen on a marquee night and he will find himself musing for 10 minutes on something that happened moments before he walked on stage. The strength there is that he can be nimble and turn any situation into a chance for comedy.

Taxonomy Classifications

Process Diagram Taxonomy Map

Through his iteration style on stage and in his broadcasting career Marc has always had the goal of reinforcing his talent and cultivating methods form which he can continue to draw inspiration from analysis of his own life.

The fifth continuum looks at the ways repeated evaluation of other artists’ and designers’ work compares to the active processes of iterating.

• Reflection: The iterative process of deep viewing and analysis of the work of others to provide creative inspiratio

• Creation: Iteration as a means of actively generating creative outcomes

These aspects of the continuum are give and take and happen simultaneously on stage and in the writing and preparing of comedy material. This is the case for Marc as well as the comics that he interviews on his show.

Appendix: Interview transcript

Lauren You were talking about how it’s not really acceptable to go up to someone who has bombed and talk about what failed...

Marc It’s a judgement call. We’re not all one big happy family where people go up and tag each others jokes unless you’re friends with somebody. That happens in relationships between comics but there’s no community standard. a lot of times it can be taken as an insult, depending on who it’s coming from, it’s delicate, there’s no protocol around it other than friendship. I don’t tag jokes too often unless I’ve been working with the guy all week or sometimes when you’re on the road and he’s watching you every night he’ll step up and say “you ever think about this or that” but I don’t know that some dudes have friends they work with but in general it’s not the best idea to walk up to somebody like that, especially somebody who’s at a different level than you and go “hey I think you should try this” cause to them it’s might more of a “that joke sucks, you should do it my way”. it’s a little tricky, you know.

L When you talk about someone on a different level you mean it’s an experience thing or something else that psychological level?

M No look if you’re on the road and you’re headlining the guy who is opening for you is on a different level. so, it’s just there are different positions in that particular world, certainly some people command more respects depending on how many years they’ve been doing it. That hierarchy usually holds. Comics generally know their place.

L And probably there’s enough feedback from the audience where you wouldn’t necessarily have to seek out feedback from other comics?

M I guess, yea of course, we all go about it in our own way. There are guys that work in a much straighter joke format. But you chip away, I’ve had jokes on the block for 5 years, you know, when you work with ideas which is what I work with, and not necessarily punch lines it comes down to to you gotta wait for the punch line. I’ve had jokes that were half done for years but they were funny enough they way they were and then all the sudden the comedy muse just hits you one night and all the sudden I got my punchline. I’ve had jokes that have evolved over the years and I look at my bits at part of on-going conversations of me evolving so a lot of time funny stuff happens. You know some kid a little while ago, some Asperger-y kid in Atlanta asked me to do a joke that I hadn’t done in like 10 years. And it was a straight up joke about, I’m trying to remember, oh now I remember, it was pretty popular joke and it got used in some other formats they did a cartoon with it and stuff so this kid asked me to do this joke and I used to do the joke all the time but we’re going back like 15 years now that I hadn’t done it and I was  like “all right, I’ll try” and I literally had to feel my brain find that joke’s groove again. It was like looking on this album of my brain you know, holding the needle looking where to drop this thing cause all I could count on was that the groove was there that once I stared it my brain would just roll through it. And I did it and it was kind of interesting.

L That actually has a name, habit forming like that, it’s called “chunking” where your brain groups being on stage with saying joke, it’s a really interesting concept.

M Yeah, comics do a lot of chunking, because we actually call things chunks. You know you’d ask like “are you gonna do that chunk on TV” or something. It used to be around a lot more, we used to say it all the time, you know “that’s a good chunk”.

L And neurologists have borrowed it and they use it when they talk about habit forming behaviors and why they’re so effective and also impossible to erase or get rid of. Good for you, bad for smokers and stuff, heh.

I’m interested in how getting constant feedback on how other people iterate, like you were saying that talking to (fellow comic) Mike Birbiglia might have stuck in your brain, have you found that any other residue from doing all these interviews with other comics has started to influence your practice?

M Well the thing is I’ve always done long form bits but never with discipline and the conversation with Mike was that is really what he does, it’s an older style of standup you don’t see as much any more. It was something  that I used to do as well but again not with real discipline. After that conversation with him and after watching Bill Cosby recently and because my own fear is less than it used to I’m much more comfortable on stage where now i can take the time to work the stuff through. It’s tricky because when you’re starting a 15 or 10 minute bit, and I talked about this with Mike too, there’s no getting out! If you’re in the middle or sort of the way into a 10 minute bit and it’s not working well you know then you gotta struggle within that bit to get what you want ot get.

L It’s sort of a rigid framework, that kind of bit?

M Well it’s only as rigid as that moment, you can really do whatever you want. You know if you just in front of a live audience you just go “well this is going no where, heh” and you can change the course but you can also just hang in there, finish the long bit.

What other things have stuck with me after these interviews?  Well the Stewart Lee interview, the British comic, out of all the interviews stuck with me. The one thing that stuck with me out of all of the interviews is that success is not something that usually comes completely unearned, not sustained success. Hard work is what yields success on some levels, that nobody is getting a free ride and people that have success generally work their ass off. The other thing is that Stewart Lee, that one changed my perception. This is a guy who is a very unique and brilliant comic and he’s respected by a certain type of person, he writes books but he’s also got a very unique voice and he doesn’t pander. He did comedy for years and then quit for a couple years becuase he could no longer  really deal with the audience in the sense that he got tired with and angry at the audience for not understanding him so he quit. Then he went back and he said that the basic things that had changed in his perception was that he no longer looked at people that didn’t get him as a problem  he looked at them with empathy and felt bad for them and felt bad for them that they had chose to see him and that they didn’t know what they were getting into. He’s not going to change what he does cause he won’t and he can’t so that whole idea of being empathetic for somebody sitting there not enjoying your show as opposed to “why the fuck don’t you get me?”, that’s a big shift in perception on the part of the comic, and very decent one. that kind of changed my brain a little bit.

L yeah that sounds like a very mature way of thinking about the audience.

M It’s mature but when you’re a comic you’re also sitting there going “why the fuck isn’t this guy laughing?” you know and it is mature but there’s that emotional reaction that’s gonna happen. But mature, yeah that’s a good word for it.

L Yeah, and this sort of leads into the other reason I wanted to interview you is your personal work but also your career and interviewing everybody in the business, is that I identify as a perfectionist terrified of failure and so I’m not a comic but I find WTF very inspirational just listening to people talk about continuing to work on their goals and persevering and talking about the minutiae of their career struggles, it’s really calming to me as an artist who also works in an iterative manner. Do you think that the way your career has spanned, could you have arrived at what WTF is without having gone through all the experiences and subsequent highs and lows of your career prior.

M I have a really hard time with hypotheticals with regards to what could have happened or what would have happened cause my brain just won’t do it. Look I mean I do everything fairly impulsively and pretty earnestly, I’m driven by my personal needs. I’m not some sort of mature artist who makes decision about their creations. My imagination is limited to emotional and mental survival, even more so than physical survival in some weird way. so I’m not a guy generating mythical landscapes or making balloon animals you know. Everything that I do is relative to getting my needs met and trying to feel better as a human being so I don’t know, the beginning of the podcast iwas in trouble on all levels possible. I was sort of depressed and broke and my career was shit and was up against a wall on all levels of survival really so I didn’t know how i was going to make a living. I might have exaggerated that in my head I was probably better than I thought I was but i’ma panic driven person in a lot of ways. Me reaching out to other people, it brought me back to something that I had lost as a kid, my father was very detached and a little explosive and unpredictable and very charismatic so I’m sort of wired to engage with that. There was a time when I was younger I was either looking for father figures or just wanting to lose myself in people that had big personalities was something that I really enjoyed doing. Whether it was pathological or not i can’t really speak to that, well I probably could but I don’t think that that’s necessary here. Really what i got back to was reaching out to my community, my peers to somehow make my struggles feel lesser and also commiserate and also to get out of myself by listening to other people’s stories. Learning to laugh again and engage like that, so much of my life as a comic was spent wandering around talking to shop owners in some weird way. for me in part of my early life and early career was wandering around with a pen and piece of paper and a notebook in whatever city I was in I would make rounds to the coffee shops the guitar store, the book store, the guy at the place that i talk to about that  thing.  It was just sort of, that was a big part of my life from high school on. So it sort of brought me back to a place where talking and engaging with other people really helped me survive mentally and emotionally. so to answer your question I  think it was a natural flow of things from a skill set that I learned almost coincidentally because of the very short career in radio. I found that avenue and then all this stuff came together. It really came out of desperation and not so much a decision.

L Sure but you know I have to offer my opinion that your process is no less valid than anyone else’s. i talk to a lot of artists and many of them are not in control and they do not make active, conscious decisions every second  they are a mess plowing through regardless. i’m trying to feel like i have more control than i do. do  we ever really have control i guess...

M The sad thing is that there is very little we have control over really and surrendering that to whatever degree you can handle will give you some piece of mind. but what are you going to fill that hole with, you know? those are sort of the weird spiritual questions that revolve around meaning  for one individual’s life. I play in those areas, I become kind of publicly obsessed with the denial of death, the Ernest Becker book, because that’s exactly what that book addresses on a cultural level, a psychological level, and anthropological level and a moral level, it’s a very weird and fascinating book. But uh also in my life recovery, in that having 12 years sober a lot of the thinking in recovery literature is around the surrender idea. it’s a provocative and profound idea. it’s really hard to stay in that groove without panicking. That’s why you get so many addicts and codependent people who are also control freaks, you know. It’s alternative to having some sort of faith, but not a defined faith necessarily but whatever you think you have control over it’s probably something you’ve just constructed to make yourself feel better.

L Maybe this questions is getting a little off track but have you ever read the book “the Artist’s Way”?

M No you know i know that book and I don’t do that shit but a lot of people i know dug it and and had some success with it.

L Well the only reason i bring it up is that she is a recovering addict and she uses alot of that same language as a therapy for people addicted to fear of success, essentially.

M I know the format and I think the process helps people get organized, I’m just not a big workbook guy. Even being in recovery I’m pretty loose about it, these principles and ideas and suggestions i just sort of integrate what i can use and try to lean on the community when necessary. you know, that’s where i’m going right now, that’s why had to change the time, I’m bit crazy, a little dry, a little edgy so you know i kinda just needed to go sit in a room full of drunks and listen to them bitch about things.

L Well so i think that’s a good place for us to stop then, thank you so much...

M What do you do?

L I’m a graduate student studying Design+Technology at Parsons

M Parsons, that’s pretty fancy. Parsons’ school of Design, that’s in uh, Rhode Island?

L No, that’s RISD. Parsons is in New York, yeah.

M Where you living?

L I’m living in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. On the L train.

M Where you from?

L I’m from Pittsburgh originally but I haven’t lived at home since I was 18 so i’ve been in New York, jeez, since then.

M Got to get outta there, huh.

L Fuck yeah. Although, Pittsburgh isn’t so bad when you’re able to get a drink and hang out, but I was underage, so i bailed.

M Yeah it seems like out of all the Pennsylvania places it’s pretty good, it seems like there’s a bit of industry and a big school there.

L It has changed since i left for sure, in the ten years i’ve been gone it has improved vastly. In the Pittsburgh paper there’re articles about how people from Brooklyn are moving there ‘cause it’s cheaper and gentrifying old neighborhoods and stuff. i missed it,  i left when everyone was turning around and heading there.

M What’s this project about though, like what are you looking to conclude here?

L So I’m going to transcribe our conversation and turn your vocabulary and methodologies that we talked about into a taxonomy of iteration map. Trying to break down to the essence of how different artists approach working in an iterative manner and developing what they do. We’re interested in bringing the language of failure to a place where it’s not something to be ashamed of. Trying and failing again and again usually mean movement towards an improved product or an improved piece rather than hoping just hoping for divine intervention in your work.

M Yeah but where does talent fall into this. Cause you know there are people who can bang their head against a wall for a lifetime and still come up with shit. How do you fit you know talent into an equation like this. Unless and artist realizes their limitations and figures out what they’re good at if they want to keep doing what they’re doing. The biggest problem with art versus engaging in a craft of some kind is that you can get the fundamentals of a craft together and still suck for your entire life. How does that figure in?

L You know, it’s a good thing to bring up, we tend to zero in on subjects that have failed and then ultimately succeeded so you make a good point. Though to interview someone and lead off with “so you’re a big failure, what’s that like?” is tough.

M I don’t know that in a discussion about talent, for years in my life, i mean you’re talking to a guy who did 45 Conan O’Brian appearances and several specials on TV and yet still cannot garner an audience. Arguable at this point in my life I would not say that i am one of the biggest selling comedians or necessarily a popular comedian. What i set out to do is not what ended up being what i’m known for when things did start to happen. It’s a curious thing.

L Sure, so that answer you know “What I’m doing now is not what I envisioned when I started out” that would be in the iterative process that would be considered a huge success in that the process of seeking a result and making adjustments to find success is a valid way of working. I guess the point is that there’s not a bar and then if you’ve hit the bar you’ve succeeded. It’s kind of like success is grown and created based on your sensitivity to the feedback that the work is giving you.

M Yeah but what, wait, you mean like feedback from your framing of what the work is doing for you?

L Well it depends, you’re very individual, you’re an artist who works alone largely. There are many other avenues of creation, people like game designers, they tend to collaborate a great deal. The criteria for success can be brokered by the group so yeah, in a way you get to set what you consider to be a success but that can change, it can be a moving target.

M It strikes me as peculiar in the sense that what you’re really talking about it seems, this iterative process, is that once you have a defined mode of expression or creativity and you put the years necessary to become a master of that craft that you can then start to express yourself more effectively and in a way that’s rooted in the craft you’ve chosen. It doesn’t seem like this conversation can exist without being connected to iterative process that would establish you as a journeyman in whatever it is that you’re choosing as your mode of expression. Now I guess my question is just that there’re a lot of people that do things for a very long time and they work very hard at it and at some point they have to realize that they’re not succeeding in a way of either making a good plate of food or displaying a painting that people give a shit about or writing a book that anybody wants to read and then you have to think about  market forces and what determines “success”. When I get emails from people or talk to people who are inspired by my show or that are relieved that they’re not alone in their process, um, you start to realize that well, sometimes you just gotta do that thing that you wanna do to know real success in a broad but to do it because the act of creativity solves something in your life or takes you to a place of what we’re talking about where all those elements of control and fear and existential issues are sort of shaded for a few minutes or a while with your own creativity. The whole idea of success in art or creativity is a little slippery.

L I agree with many of the people we’ve researched, we’re not really interested in how successful anybody is. I mean it definitely makes for a compelling story and of course we’re all programmed to read that narrative arc, that’s just how things happen. Honestly the outcome is sort of regarded as the by-product of the process. Iteration is a technique to explore how work is created but I don’t disagree that sometimes there are objective standards for success in different fields. But I guess that why the iterative process could benefit in general by freeing them from that linear trajectory of “I will do these things and then I will succeed”, you know what I mean?

M Yeah.

L It’s sort of broadening the field in a way that maybe doesn’t necessarily level it as far the work you would need to put in but...

M Yeah i guess you have to figure out how the process in any way placates  the perpetual heartbreak of being a creative person.

L couldn’t agree more. well thanks again for you time.

M You’re welcome.

L Ok if i follow up with an email sometime in case i want to ask a few more questions? I’ll keep you posted on the project too.

M sure thing.

L thanks!