The brilliant thing about Maron's show is that comedians share all the same demons of artists and poets and they're good talkers. They turn all that anger outward, they express it with full voice, and inject humor as a way to say, look, I survived. I persist. Whereas most writers turn inward and are in danger of being eaten alive.
As he says of his ill-fated tenure at Air America:
“I really began to believe that the struggles of most people are existential, not political,” he said, “and my biggest struggles were existential.”Which is to say, politics is fine if all you want is dialectic and the rigors of partisan logic. But if you really want to know what's going on, you need to engage with all the messy, unresolved, patently absurd aspects of life. You have to face up to the fact that you're here, alive today, and decide what you're going to do about it before you die.
