“I think if Hitler were alive today, he’d probably appear on Theo Von’s podcast,” Marc Maron jokes toward the end of his new HBO special, Panicked. He then proceeds to imitate a half-baked, drawling Von, archbishop of the dudebro podcaster, softballing questions about drug use to a hypothetical Hitler. “On our podcast,” he snarks in an earlier moment, “we can bravely speak power to truth, now that truth can no longer defend itself.”

When Maron announced he was ending his long-running, highly influential interview show WTF With Marc Maron, it might have seemed surprising that the comic was giving up his hard-won platform. But while the podcast’s relevance had faded, a recent take-no-prisoners press tour raised Maron’s profile again. In something like a political and cultural crusade, Maron has been explicitly calling out comedians, from stand-up comics to podcast bros, for ushering in the current era of fascism.

“Under the umbrella of ‘anti-woke,’ we’ve lost a tremendous amount of democratic-leaning ideas and movements,” he told a visibly displeased Howie Mandel on his YouTube podcast Howie Mandel Does Stuff. Mandel countered that comedians didn’t have that much power.

“Are you fucking out of your mind?” Maron shot back.

Maron continually insists that comedy drives politics, and that the current long era of “anti-woke” comedy has actively helped shift political tides to the far right. In his view, comedians and podcasters aren’t just straying from their lanes. They’re dumbing down and overtaking comedy itself — and that comedy is then shifting our cultural norms into something ugly and dangerous.

Maron’s focus is clearly on larger cultural shifts. But it’s also worth asking: is he right about the state of comedy?

Maron has always leaned left, but it’s been a while since he’s been this outspoken

Like many of the current biggest names in podcasting, Maron’s career begins and ends in stand-up work. After watching the ascent of colleagues in the East Village alt scene like Louis C.K. and Sarah Silverman, he became a regular on the left-leaning Air America radio network, which launched in 2004 as a counterbalance to conservative talk radio of the era. While Air America ultimately floundered, Maron used his built-in leftist network audience to kickstart a pivot into what was then the niche arena of podcasting.

When WTF started in 2009, it was the first major interview podcast on the scene; The Joe Rogan Experience began just three months later. Although it took a while for podcasting on the whole to become the ubiquitous phenomenon it is today, Maron himself quickly gained a reputation as a surprisingly intimate interviewer, praised both for having a wide range of guests and for

© Vox