Marc Maron: ‘I’m familiar with coke, anger, bullying, selfishness’

The night before I meet Marc Maron, I go to his standup show in London. These days Maron is best known for his hugely popular podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, which he started in 2009, and on which he has interviewed everyone from Barack Obama to Keith Richards and Chris Rock. He conducts most of the interviews from his garage in LA, and they are almost always revealing and always entertaining. In 2010, Robin Williams talked about his depression and addictions, four years before he killed himself. Obama talked about the racism and African American stereotypes that shaped his sense of self. WTF now gets 7m downloads a month.

But in the 90s, when I first discovered him, Maron was not known for his empathetic dialogues; rather, he was seen as an aggressive monologuer. Back then, he was a struggling standup, with a style that was often described as angry and arrogant – or, as his friend Louis CK once put it, “a huge amount of insecurity and craziness”. He was known as a comedian’s comedian, which is a nice way of saying the industry liked him, but audiences didn’t.

The man I see on stage in London is unrecognisable from those days. Once he struggled to sell tickets in comedy clubs; tonight he has sold out the 2,500-seat Royal Festival Hall, and his audience – mostly male thirty- and fortysomethings – cheer at his surrealist fantasies about Mike Pence, as well as more gentle stuff about how people used to find things out before the internet. For a man who has always claimed he doesn’t know what happiness is, Maron looks suspiciously like he might be enjoying himself. Some of this could be down to mellowing with age – he is, as he repeatedly mentions