Marc Maron and the Comedy of Doubt

On Comedy In a special recorded last year, the standup proved prescient by focusing on his uncertainty in the face of daunting world moments. Sometimes, pessimism pays off. For instance, last year, around the same time that the coronavirus invaded the human population, Marc Maron stood onstage in Los Angeles and asked: “Isn’t there something that could bring everyone together and realize we have to put a stop to like almost everything? What would it take?

” Then he answered his own question: “Something terrible. That’s what brings people together. Nothing good. ” In “End Times Fun,” released on Netflix last week, Maron, 56, imagines doomsday scenarios with baroquely grim imagery: skies aflame, waters rising, lizard infestations, melting faces, technological singularity.

His apocalyptic mood might have once seemed like typical hyperbole, the latest gloom and doom from a neurotic progressive in the age of Trump, but it now has the thundering resonance of prophecy. Maron meets the moment not just because we are all inching closer to his dark worldview, but also because he’s the rare comedian to ask the really big questions, the existential ones that take on more urgency in a crisis. When people are frightened, as they are now, they often turn to religion, which for Maron, doesn’t only mean prayer or visiting houses of worship. In the first show I saw of his in 2000, “Jerusalem Syndrome,” he described Disney, Microsoft and other corporate giants as our new gods, calming fears and providing comfort — for a price, of course.

He also has repeatedly poked fun at his own shaky devotion. “I think I’m spiritual, maybe not,” he said in a previous special, summing up a certain brand of faith in a secular age. “End Times Fun,” a state-of-the-nation special, is his most ambitious production, sometimes to a fault, veering from reflective to raunchy, covering everything from the anti-vaccination and #MeToo movements to evangelical politics. Some of his premises, about the shadiness of Trump or the sexuality of Pence, are too familiar.

What stands out is his anchoring theme: a skepticism of unshakable belief of any kind. Speaking in a deadpan that gets raspier the longer the sentence goes, Maron, who wears jeans, a vest and a bushy beard, has left his old anger behind. He sounds more seen-it-all weary, impatient with anyone who thinks they have answers, including his fellow podcaster Joe Rogan, whom he needles for selling health supplements before saying he’ll get some flak about it online from “the monoculture of freethinkers,” a salvo that seems aimed at the class of commentators and comics reflexively at war with political correctness. Maron describes himself as “85 percent woke, the other 15 percent I keep to myself.