The Dire Warning for Liberals Buried in Marc Maron’s ‘Panicked’

A few minutes into the new HBO standup special Panicked, Marc Maron, America's poet laureate of dread and despair, says to his audience of mostly like-minded lefties, “Progressives have really got to figure out how to deal with this buzzkill problem. You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism.” He pauses for a big laugh and round of applause and adds: “No one can ruin a barbecue quicker than a liberal: So, you want something from the grill? What about the genocide?”

Then he sits on a stool and continues. Maron fans know this move marks the next chapter in his routine. An outspoken progressive—in the early 2000s, Maron earned his lefty bona fides on the now defunct Air America Radio—he opens his shows pacing the stage, working himself into a froth as he talks about politics. When he sits, the transition begins to his other trademark: interiority.

Over the past decade, Maron has emerged as the nation’s premiere comic at mining his own neuroses (non-Larry David category), spinning existential dread into belly laughs and poignant observations about the precarious present. After the sudden death of his partner, Lynn Shelton, in 2020, Maron has also been the voice of grief. And Panicked’s closing bit, during which he plays a portion of Taylor Swift’s “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” from his phone, is a few of the finest minutes of standup released this year. He brings you to tears, then releases you with a laugh. (Check out Maron performing the song himself at the L.A. club Largo at the Coronet recently; he turns it into a gauzy, Mazzy Star-like number.)

But it’s the crack about progressives that speaks most to this moment. At any other time in his career, the joke wouldn’t seem so profound. The sixty-one-year-old comic is known as much for his podcast, WTF, as his standup. Twice a week, for the past sixteen years, Maron has interviewed comedians, actors, directors, writers, musicians, and politicians. He practically invented the long-form podcast interview. A decade ago, Slate ranked the 25 best podcast episodes of all time. His 2010 interview with Louis CK was No. 1. Despite the avalanche of podcasts since then, it would probably still rank in the top ten. In 2015, he interviewed President Obama, long before podcasts were part of a politician’s press plan. If there’s ever a podcast hall of fame, Maron makes the inaugural class.

In May, he dropped a bombshell on his listeners: he’s ending WTF. The final show will air in October. The primary reason is burnout. He and his producer didn’t want to continue and risk turning out episodes that didn’t meet their high standards. Meanwhile, Maron’s career off the mic is steadily taking flight. Beyond standup, he’s emerged as an actor. He appears opposite Owen Wilson in the golf-themed Apple TV show, Stick, which was just renewed for a second season. He’s the voice of the snake in the animated movie, The Bad Guys 2. And he has a supporting role in the upcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. But the era of hearing him twice weekly on our phones is nearly finished.

WTF’s long run was more than entertainment; it was emotional catharsis for the host and, often, his listeners. Maron opens each episode with a monologue during which he often reflects on his inner turmoil and wrestles with his anxiety and depression. It’s raw and confessional. He's a standard-bearer for a middle-age guy who seeks understanding and values empathy. Maron will also admit he’s far from perfect; he likes to say he’s 85 percent woke and 15 percent toxic. And his interviews don't aim for a bombastic quote that will drive engagement. Instead, Maron tries to understand the totality of the person—especially how they create their art—by encouraging the subject to tell his or her story and punctuating the narrative with probing questions.

For nearly the last decade, his style and interview subjects have served as a counterweight to the so-called manosphere, which is the constellation of male podcasters who embrace a certain retrograde masculinity and threw their support behind Trump in 2024. Their influence over the behavior of American men is significant and eclipses that of Maron. But year after year, as progressivism has faltered in the face of MAGA, he has stood among the rearguard of the movement toward a more enlightened man.

No one can fault Maron ending the podcast. And he has promised to continue using his voice for good as well as contributing money and time to the causes he espouses. He’s also suggested that what the world needs now is not necessarily more righteous indignation but better, sharper entertainment—relief, distraction, escape. He’s not wrong. Panicked is proof that Maron can make an audience belly-laugh while kicking off an important conversation.

And it’s one that his fans need to reckon with. Maron’s joke about progressives is an acknowledgement that all the earnest, honest talking about being better people and building a better, fairer world didn’t work. Or that it doesn’t work anymore. He has said, in fact, that he feels partly responsible for the manosphere, because he helped establish the very format the MAGA disciples would use to spread their poison.

Marc Maron talks to Seth Meyers on July 30 backstage at Late Night with Seth Meyers. In May, Maron said he would be ending his podcast, WTF, in October after 16 years of twice-weekly episodes.

It’s these podcasters, along with right-wing TV hosts and Republican politicians, who are so effective at weaponizing the progressive earnestness. A Fox News host like Dana Perino or a podcaster like Mike Cernovich will seize upon social media commentary from a small—possibly annoying—group of liberals and deploy it as evidence that wokeness and cancel culture are out of control. (Last week, for instance, Fox News devoted 85 minutes to the Sydney Sweeney-American Eagle controversy and three minutes to the Epstein-Trump controversy, according to Media Matters.) All of it feeds into an effective Republican campaign pillar: the left has lost its mind.

Maron understands the state of play. For progressives, his words should raise an alarm that they need new voices to fill the void he’s leaving behind—and that they need to understand the way the game is played: anything the left says will be used against it in the court of public opinion. And also, maybe try not to be so unrelentingly uptight. It’s okay to laugh at yourself every once and a while.