This Tuesday, in AOL headquarters, Manhattan, New York City, Marc Maron decided to talk to people. Maron, a comedian made famous for his podcast WTF?, has been a growing success around America. He is known for his openness and brutal honesty, but he also has a streak of sentimentalism that is oddly charming.
But back to Tuesday; back to AOL headquarters in Manhattan. What was going on there?
The room was strange, because it wasn’t really a room. Really it was just the most cinematic corner of the office. The stage was low, lit by little lights producing big colours and bright, but cool spots on the stage. The seating was thrown together, comprised of folding chairs. When one row filled, more chairs were added to that row so it could seat more in maybe less idyllic positions. There were cameras also: about five and they scanned the room to pick up b-roll or got different angles of body doubles who sat where Moran and his interviewer were going to be seated so lighting could be established. And so angles could be marked out. So everything went smooth.
When Maron took this stage, with moderator Paul Ulane, there was a relaxed formality to his entrance. Maron bickered with his moderator over which chair was his. He was chewing gum and instantly realized that he needed to spit it out. And his opening jokes began when the moderator asked him if we was enjoying this good part of his career.
“Well I don’t know how you would define enjoy,” he said, “I can generally afford to eat wherever I want. Which is nice. Uh, I walked around the other day. That was pleasant. I figured out how to compulsively use Instagram yesterday, and here I thought I was doing some arty sort of exposition of New York, and when I ran into people that follow me they said, ‘You alright?’ and I’m like ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You seem a little manic with the pictures.’ So yeah I was having fun, but apparently it was misunderstood.”
The interview continued in this vein, which at first seemed very rehearsed. Maron had a good and generally funny answer to all of the questions which were posed and Ulane seemed to know when the joke was finished and when to ask the next question. But as the interview went on, less scripted things seemed to begin to start happening. Maron, who himself is an excellent interviewer started to take control of the interview. It seemed like he was getting excited, but that really happened when he was allowed to answer fan questions. As he said earlier in the interview “that fourth wall [needs] to be sort sufficiently broken.”
“Boundaries are not anything I’m good at,” he said, “So I actually go out of my way to break that boundary.” And there is almost no better way to do that than talking directly to your audience.
As he spoke with them, he was getting up, and pacing, and preaching and the whole audience was laughing. It became apparent that he was improvising everything he said. He was laughing some of the things he said, gone was the level-headed, coolness of the rehearsed interview. Now the questions were fresh and fun and the people asking them were also fresh and fun. Because they weren’t just fans asking silly questions like what Maron’s favorite color was, they were asking for his advice. They were comics and actors still paying their dues and Maron empathized with them.
He talked, in his interview about the weird relationship he had with fans. Where since he had always been so personal on his podcast, his fans knew everything about him and they’d approach his like friends. Only he still knew nothing about them. But he could assume that they were people like him and because of that he could have this weird relationship with them that was still kind of nice.
Here is a link to a video of the interview.
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