Marc Maron is ending his podcast in a couple of months, but he’s given up hope of mending fences with Jon Stewart before it’s over. In the early years of WTF, the curmudgeonly Maron used the show to work through not only personal demons but also long-standing grudges with other comedians. Over time, he managed to reconcile with nearly everyone he’d once had beef with—except one: Jon Stewart.
There had been some faint hope — fueled entirely by Internet speculation — that Maron might book Stewart before the final episode, but that’s looking unlikely. Stewart doesn’t like Marc Maron, and Maron gets it. He admits he was a dick to Stewart back when they were both starting out. In the 1990s, Maron even considered Stewart his “nemesis,” a grudge he now attributes to personal jealousy.
At the time, they were both chasing the same niche: smart, political, satirical comedy. And Stewart — Maron has since conceded — won that battle decisively. For years, though, Maron downplayed that win as unearned.
“When I was coming up as a comic, he had figured it out,” Maron told Rachel Martin on her NPR podcast last week. “He had — I always used to think it was just because he committed to a haircut and a way of presenting. But, like, he was just everywhere.”
In 2018, Maron told The Guardian, “Jon always represented to me why I was failing … So when I’d see him, I’d act like he was personally destroying me.” During a set in 2009, Maron even called Stewart a “Jewish pander-monkey.”
That obviously didn’t go over well. “He does not particularly like me,” Maron said. “I don’t think it’s a daily thing, but I annoyed him to the point where that was a reality.”
It’s not like Maron hasn’t tried to make amends. “I reached out to him, and I remember … he called me back. I was in a hotel room in Portland,” Maron recalled on NPR. “And he goes, ‘Hey, you know, it’s Jon Stewart.’ I’m like, ‘Hey man, how you doing?’” But after Maron pitched him the episode he had in mind, Stewart shut it down: “No, I’m not doing that.”
“He said, ‘Look, you know, it’s like whatever you’re doing … there’s no love here.’ And then he said… ‘I’m sure what you’re doing is very creative, but … I’m just—there’s no love here.’ And I’m like, ‘Got it, dude.’”
And that was that. Maron’s clearly grown a lot over the last decade. He’s matured, let go of many of his old grudges (well, except the one with anti-woke hacks), and I actually think an episode with Stewart could be a meaningful conversation for both of them. But I also completely get why Stewart wouldn’t want to revisit a mostly one-sided feud in which Maron repeatedly trashed him while Stewart stayed publicly silent.
Even so, that doesn’t mean Maron isn’t taking some quiet satisfaction in how things turned out. “Over the arc of it, the fact that he, like everybody, landed with a podcast—that’s satisfying,” Maron told NPR, because “I helped create it.”
That satisfaction, of course, has to be tempered by the fact that the format he helped pioneer also gave us Joe Rogan. And Maron’s feud with Rogan isn’t ending anytime soon either.
