Marc Maron Has Beef with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher, Too

Marc Maron has been doing publicity for his Panicked special on HBO Max for, conservatively speaking, a year and a half. I love Maron, but he may have set the record this past month for the number of podcasts he’s appeared on. Maybe after he ends his podcast later this year, he’ll just become a professional guest. He’s good. He’s political. He always has soundbites, and he has no reservations about expressing his feelings about colleagues in his industry.

One of my favorite WTF with Marc Maron episodes, in fact, is his interview with Jerry Seinfeld. It was back during COVID, conducted on Zoom, and I recall that Seinfeld didn’t really know Marc Maron from Adam, which I think kind of bugged Maron. Maron got Seinfeld to open up a little, but it was noteworthy that at the end of the episode, Seinfeld thanked Maron for allowing him to do a “deep dive,” and Maron responded, “You should come back, because you’ve barely scratched the surface.”

Maron also asked Seinfeld about a Scientology class he once audited, which came up because another comedian, Bobcat Goldthwait, took a dig at Seinfeld and his TV show in a newspaper interview in the ’90s.

“Here is this creepy Scientologist guy (dating) teenage girls - which I don’t care about one way or another,” Goldthwait said in 1995. “What I find creepy is that people are convinced he lives in that apartment, and those are his wacky friends. They don’t like each other; they’re actors paid to pretend they like Jerry Seinfeld. He’s a weird guy. But everybody thinks he’s normal and I’m weird.”

Needless to say, Seinfeld hates Bobcat Goldthwait.

But that is neither here nor there, because over the weekend, Maron appeared on Pod Save America with Jon Lovett. They talked for an hour about politics, the state of the world, Theo Von, and the death of Maron’s ex, Lynn Shelton. They also briefly talked about Jerry Seinfeld in the context of older comedians that Lovett, at least, still thinks are “trying to stay sharp and curious about the world.”

He offered Jerry Seinfeld as an example of that kind of comedian. “Seinfeld is a guy that keeps trying to do new material, and you can like or dislike what Seinfeld does,” Lovett said.

“Oh yeah. You can,” Maron replied, sarcastically.

“But even the other day,” Lovett continued, Seinfeld “gave an answer about woke stuff, and it got some blowback, and then he actually came back and said, ‘You know what? I was wrong about that.’ And he actually gave a really good answer. He said, ‘You know what? What I said was stupid. And actually, if the goalposts move, I should hit the goalposts, that’s my job.’”

And that gave Maron the opening he needed to take a jab at Seinfeld. “I think that what happened with Jerry, ultimately, is that he was really a guy who didn’t speak much publicly. And then, just because of the advent of podcasts and the needs of the new publicity environment, all of a sudden Jerry was never shutting up.

“So, everybody saw Jerry for Jerry, and you do with that what you will,” Maron said, clearly insinuating he’s not a fan of the Jerry we see. “I’m glad he apologized. And that you feel good about that,” he told Lovett.

Quickly turning to other “beefs,” Lovett also asked Maron what he thought of Bill Maher.

“I always had a problem with his tone … I feel with Bill, and it happens with some of the other boomers, that there’s this desperate chasing of relevance that changes how someone approaches what they do. And it also makes the whole undertaking feel desperate. Outside of his ideas primarily about wokeness, I don’t know. He’s just not for me … but I can’t see past the desperation in what he’s willing to do to stay in the conversation.”

Marc Maron disliking Bill Maher may be the most obvious beef ever.

via Pod Save America