Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 12, 2025
Marc Maron didn’t invent podcasting, but he might as well have detonated the first cultural nuke. The comedian’s WTF podcast reshaped the medium, paving the way for an entire generation of “comedy” podcasters —- some brilliant, others toxic —- who’ve since claimed the space as their own. Now, with retirement from podcasting on the horizon, Maron’s latest HBO stand-up special, Panicked, feels like a deliberate strike against the worst of them.
It’s been fascinating watching the discourse around Panicked, in which Maron spends the first ten minutes railing against the current administration. Clips from the special made the rounds on social media over the weekend, and plenty of people were thrilled to see someone (besides South Park) stand up to fascism.
Of course, longtime fans were quick to claim they’d been here all along, noting that Maron’s been this way for twenty years. “How did it take so long for everyone to notice?” Others countered with, “Maron is great, but this other comic has been saying the same things forever —- why hasn’t anyone noticed her?”
It was typical weekend social media chaos, where everyone feels the need to have a take immediately. But the moment someone suggested that Maron might be “the Joe Rogan of the left” is when I decided to log off. Rogan could conceivably be the Maron of the right, but calling Maron the Rogan of the left is like calling B.B. King the Black Elvis — you can’t be the other guy in a genre you pioneered.
And while there may have been lesser-known predecessors, Maron is essentially the Oppenheimer of comedy podcasts. He popularized a medium now dominated by Dax Shepard, Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tony Hinchcliffe, Shane Gillis, and other “comedy” voices.
Which is why I appreciate what Maron’s doing as he nears retirement from podcasting: he’s taking aim at the anti-woke voices that sprang up in his wake. He’s not apologizing for the evil he may have inadvertently inspired — nor should he — but he is using his current spotlight to go on the offensive. Maron has been railing against anti-woke comedians on his podcast for years. In the last week, he’s doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down — on his stand-up special (which includes a merciless bit on Theo Von and another lampooning right-wing comics via a fictional character), on Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee’s Bad Friends podcast, and on Howie Mandel’s podcast, where he even got some uncomfortable pushback.
In one clip, he sums it up clearly: the right has basically won the culture war. “You got the freedom that you wanted. You can say whatever you want. They’re defeated. Their rights have been denied. The policies that you encouraged with your stupid material are now policy … we’ve lost a tremendous amount of Democratic-leaning ideas and movements … so now it’s reality, and you still want to keep kicking [marginalized people]?”
“My problem is, you’re going to start talking about anti-woke — that’s going to be your point of view, your ideological grounding for what you do. OK, that’s fine. But why does it have to be the same four f**king things? They talk about the same sh*t, and I don’t know a better definition of ‘hack.’ How much sh*t do you have to give trans people? What’s your big problem with gay people? What’s your big problem with women? What is this, the f**king ’80s again?”
And then Howie Mandel mentioned Ricky Gervais approvingly, and Maron just stopped — recognizing the futility of arguing with someone too oblivious to get it.
Maron doesn’t need to win these arguments — he’s already done the damage and built the stage they’re standing on. If some of those stages now host grifters recycling the same four “anti-woke” bits like they’re playing open mic night in 1987, that’s not on him. But, man alive, I do enjoy watching him use his last lap as a podcaster to torch them on his way out.
