Marc Maron Grapples With Grief in New Stand-Up Special

Marc Maron has been waiting to do an HBO special his whole life.

The comedian, actor, and podcast host has starred in several stand-up specials over the years, but since he started comedy back in the mid-’80s, he’s considered HBO the crème de la crème. “It’s one of the bucket list, kind of grail-type of things,” he tells Vanity Fair. “It’s a prestige thing. It’s almost like Netflix is—well, I don’t want to call it a dumpster fire—but it’s just sort of a repository for everything, and nothing has any priority unless the algorithm dictates it. Whereas HBO is like, it’s a curated game over there.”

For his new special, From Bleak to Dark, which will air on HBO on Saturday, February 11, Maron uses his signature style of biting comedy to talk about a myriad of hot-button issues from religion to abortion and antisemitism, but he also delves into the recent events of his own personal life. The most striking moments come when he reflects on his father’s dementia and the loss of his partner, Lynn Shelton, who died in May 2020, a topic he wasn’t totally sure he’d ever be able to share in this way.

Maron, who hosts the popular podcast WTF With Marc Maron, spoke with Vanity Fair about crafting the narrative for this special, his ambitions for his acting career, and what he thinks about the To Leslie Oscar drama. 

Vanity Fair: How did you come up with the title From Bleak to Dark**?**

Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark is something somebody said to me, and it was such a great thing. I’d created and written a show with Sam Lipsyte, who’s my best friend, and we sold it to FX and we wrote a script and they liked it, but they wanted a second script. And we wrote the story for the second script, and we were on a notes Zoom with FX and my management company. So it was me and Sam and all these other people, and [President of FX Entertainment] Nick Grad said, “Look guys, I love the story. It’s great. Love the writing. It’s great. Have no specific notes, but is there any way we can get it from bleak to dark?” And I thought like, “Oh my God, that’s what I do.” But they ultimately didn’t buy the show, but nonetheless, it stuck with me as a great moment. So I should write him an email and thank him.

What would you say was the main throughline for this special?

Well, I knew that part of my responsibility as a comic that I’ve decided is to do these culturally satiric and cutting and aggressive assessments of what I see happening in the world. And I realized that we had to do that upfront because we had to get this stuff about grief and about Lynn’s passing further down into it. I moved this stuff around a lot over the years, a year and a half I was working it. 

So I just entered into the Roe v. Wade and this fascism element and the stupid people and the culture of tribalism and this woke and unwoke business. But then I am very aware of the tone change where I literally sit down, and I start speaking from my experience about aging and about my father, and that kind of shifts it into personal.