He’s offering an olive branch, sort of.
Marc Maron is revealing the true reasons for his feud with Jon Stewart.
“Jon never did anything to me,” Maron, 62, told Esquire in an interview published Thursday, adding that their feud was “petty.”
“I was just jealous,” the comedian added, noting that their feud was “fully fueled” by his “insecurity.”
Maron and Stewart, 62, were rising stars at the same time in the ‘90s. They both hosted the Comedy Central show “Short Attention Span Theater” at different times, before the network axed it in 1994.
Stewart went on to host “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in 1999, and currently still hosts it part-time, alongside rotating guest hosts.
Maron, meanwhile, went on to star on the Netflix comedy series “GLOW” and host his hit podcast, “WTF With Marc Maron,” which launched in 2009 and ended on Oct. 13 after more than 1,000 episodes.
“The podcast ‘WTF’ was the original celebrity interview podcast that was followed by a slew of successful imitators, such as ‘Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard’ and ‘SmartLess’ hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes.
“Throughout my early career, Jon, who is roughly my age, was everywhere,” Maron explained.
He said, “My envy of him was always … I would just sh-t on him, and to his face. It was consuming. I couldn’t get through a week without him being on the cover of a magazine. For some reason, I saw him as, ‘If I could only have my shit together, I could be more like that guy.’ … Which wasn’t true, because I was out of my mind, and I was definitely gunning for something else.”
In a 2009 standup set, Maron, who is also Jewish, referred to Stewart as a “Jewish pander-monkey.”
During a July interview on NPR’s Wild Card with Rachel Martin podcast, Maron said, “we’ve had confrontations about it and we are not friends” and referred to Stewart as his “nemesis.”
The comedian also told The Guardian in 2018, “Jon always represented to me why I was failing… So when I’d see him, I’d act like he was personally destroying me.”
Stewart hasn’t addressed his relationship with Maron publicly. But in September, former “Daily Show” writer and correspondent Wyatt Cenac said on the Inside Late Night podcast that he was the “consigliere” between Stewart and Maron during a previous effort to mend fences.
Cena, who worked on “The Daily Show” from 2008 to 2012, didn’t specify the date but clarified that it happened during that time period.
He added, “Maron and Jon talk. I hear both of their sides of it. I may be the one person who heard the aftermath from both of them. I hear Jon’s side of it, and Jon was like, ‘I’m not going to do his podcast…he just wants me to do the podcast so that it gets numbers for his podcast. I don’t want to do that.’”
Cenac offered his perspective: “To me it was like oh s—, you two are the same…I think they both see each other as a threat.”
In his recent Esquire interview, Maron also described “The Daily Show” host as a “smart, cute, Jewish guy” who was “disciplined” and knew how to use talents.
In contrast, the “GLOW” actor noted, “I never had any control over my talent. I never knew its limitations or what it was.”
Early in his podcast’s run, he reached out to Stewart to see if he’d appear on “WTF With Marc Maron” and was “kind of apologizing” on the phone.
Maron said that Stewart replied, “There’s no love here.”
The comedian added that Stewart told him, “‘I might be willing to have coffee or something, but I’m not doing that with you,’” referring to talking to Maron in a public forum on “WTF with Marc Maron.”
Maron recalled, “And then he said, ‘I’m sure what you’re doing is very creative, and good luck with it.’ Just the stinging condescension of that … it didn’t help anything.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land ’
