Popular culture is riddled with beef between celebrities. Frank Sinatra versus Marlon Brando, Taylor Swift versus Kanye West, Oasis versus Blur. But comedian and influential podcaster Marc Maron’s feud with Jon Stewart has been awkwardly one-sided, which Maron admitted to in an interview with Esquire’s editor-in-chief, Michael Sebastian.
In the first installment of Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned” video series, Maron sat down with Sebastian for a lengthy conversation. Along with insight about his HBO special Panicked, the end of WTF with Marc Maron, and his work in the upcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, Maron explained what his “feud” with Jon Stewart is really about. As Maron puts it, it was “just a petty, kind of fully fueled by insecurity.”
When Sebastian asks to clarify whose insecurity Maron was talking about, the sixty-two-year-old comic says, “Mine.”
“Jon never did anything to me,” he adds. “I was just jealous.”
Maron further explains that his beef with Stewart had some awkward timing when—during the Colbert/Paramount fiasco this summer—an interview where Maron spoke negatively about Stewart ran at the same time when Stewart was standing up for Stephen Colbert. “Of course, it makes clickbait, it’s the same day that John’s doing something noble, standing up for Colbert. And then this other clickbait is like, ‘Maron still hates John.’ I’m like, the fucking timing on that.”
Says Maron, “I was just jealous because when I was coming up, he was a smart, cute Jewish guy … Some people have foresight and are disciplined careerists, and they know how to understand their talent, harness it, and then figure out how to capitalize on it with their skillset on their terms. And there are guys now that have that. I went to a birthday party for John Mulaney, and I’m just surrounded by all these young guns who are talking about their lawyers and what they need from them. I’m like, I didn’t even have a fucking lawyer. I never had any control over my talent. I never knew its limitations or what it was. I was just all in and just demanding a place in the world of comedy.”
Maron elaborates that Jon was not only around Maron’s age, but was “everywhere.” “It never stopped,” he says, “I remember when he did the MTV show, and then he had the talk show, and he had me on. My envy was always so—I would just shit on him, and to his face. He was just consuming. I couldn’t get through a week without him being on the cover of a magazine. And for some reason, I saw him as, If I could only have my shit together, I could be more like that guy if I could commit.“
But Maron corrects himself, adding that such thinking “wasn’t true.”
“I was out of my mind, and I was definitely gunning for something else. I don’t think I got into comedy to be an entertainer or have a job as a talk show host or anything.” When Sebastian questions Maron on what he actually got into comedy for, he says it was “to hold space and to speak my mind.”
He continues: “I loved comedy, so I thought if I can do that in comedy, I thought it as sort of a noble undertaking. The only rules of comedy, the only context is, you should be funny. But outside of that, you can fucking do whatever you want! Really. On that stage, you get the range. You go from Andy Kaufman to Larry the Cable Guy. The spectrum is like, you can do whatever you want up there as long as you’re funny. Don’t matter how weird you are, no matter what your thoughts are, no matter how fucked up mentally you are, if you can make it funny, you can be who you are. So I think I had a big belief in that I will eventually be who I am, and I always was, but it was not whole until fairly recently. So Jon really just represented that, and I was annoying to him. Eventually, he was like, ‘I don’t need to take this shit from you. Fuck Maron.’ But I get it.”
Maron ends the topic by telling Esquire he tried to get Jon Stewart as a guest on WTF early in the show’s run as a way to mend fences. “I remember, it was in Portland, Oregon, and I was like … I’m kind of making up with people, and you [Stewart] and I have had this thing for a while. He’s like, ‘Well, yeah, there’s no love here.’ Then he basically said, ‘I might be willing to have coffee or something, but I’m not doing that [podcast] with you.’ Then he said, ‘I’m sure what you’re doing is very creative. Good luck with it.’ And just the stinging condescension of that didn’t help anything. Now he’s doing a podcast. Full circle.”
“What I’ve Learned” is Esquire’s long-running interview series that has seen wisdom from countless legends. You can read Maron’s “What I’ve Learned” here.
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