By Stuart Nulman
I first saw Marc Maron perform at the Just For Laughs festival back in 2009.
He was appearing at the Theatre St. Catherine with his one-man show “Scorching the Earth”, as part of the festival’s Flying Solo Series. I didn’t know much about him, but I decided to give it a shot and see what he was all about. To say that he commanded the stage with his high-octane story of how he battled insecurities, marriages, alcohol, drugs and career ups and downs and remain standing after all this time was indeed an understatement. It was the most intense, enthralling 60 minutes of stand-up comedy and soul baring that I have ever witnessed.
Needless to say, that was when my interest in Marc Maron the comedian and the less-than-perfect human being began. And when he returned to Just For Laughs two years later as one of the most highly regarded names in comedy and with a mega successful podcast called “WTF”, I was not surprised. When I interviewed Maron last year for my Grapevine column and he told me that he was in the process of writing a book that would be published the following year, I hoped that it would just as fascinating and intense as what I experienced while watching him in “Scorching the Earth” back in 2009.
That book, which is called “Attempting Normal”, has met all of my expectations, and so much more. It is the most brutally honest memoir to come from a comedian since Lenny Bruce’s landmark 1963 autobiography “How To Talk Dirty and Influence People”.
What we get from this book is the frank truth about why Marc Maron is so angst-ridden, anxiety-laden and filled with rage, and how he used the art of comedy to try and come to terms with those personal demons. From growing up with a capital “D” dysfunctional family, to his love of books, to his fondness for vice (especially prostitutes and porn), his growing family of cats that have become part of the scenery of his L.A. home, his two failed marriages (especially how his second marriage began to fall apart after he angrily broke a plastic orange chair), Maron writes with such an enormous sense of anger, intelligence and reflection to what shaped his character and why. We may not pity him, but we get a much broader understanding into the psyche of a comedian, and why he needs that humourous outlet as a means of coming to terms with a difficult life (which is why he is so comfortable with conversing with his fellow comics on “WTF” and succeeds tremendously in having them bare their souls to him and the podcast’s devoted listenership).
And like any memoir, “Attempting Normal” contains its share of personal anecdotes that at times border on the bizarre. Two of my favorites include what was probably one of the weirdest job interviews I ever read about (which was more like a psychological battle of wits)… the 1994 meeting he had with Saturday Night Live creator/executive producer Lorne Michaels at his 30 Rock office for the possibility of being a cast member of the show; needless to say, Maron didn’t get the job, after he took a candy from a bowl on Michaels’ desk. The other is one of the three brushes with death that Maron describes in the book, in which he gives a bowel-clenching account of how, during a gig in Memphis, defied the local naysayers and ate a piece of ultra hot and spicy fried chicken from a very popular local restaurant called Prince’s Chicken.
As an added bonus, the book also contains the entire transcript of the keynote address he delivered at the 2011 Just For Laughs Comedy Conference. This speech can be classified as the definitive Marc Maron, as he boldly gives a perfect summary of the world of stand-up comedy and what it’s like to tell jokes for a living. “I love comedians,” he admits. “I respect anyone anyone who goes all in to do what I consider a noble profession and art form. Despite whatever drives us toward this profession – insecurity, need for attention, megalomania, poor parenting, anger, a mixture of all the above – whatever it is, we comics are out there on the front lines of our sanity.”
“Attempting Normal” is the unabashed manifesto of an individual who rose, and fell, and rose again from an acute sense of moral, spiritual, emotional and professional bankruptcy to become the role model (and maybe poster boy) of what a stand-up comic has to go through on the road to security, success, acceptance – and yes — normalcy.
This review originally appeared int he June 8 edition of the West End Times.
