Marc Maron’s two-part WTF conversation with Louis C.K. in 2010 was a landmark in the blossoming podcast industry, named the best episode of all time in 2014 by Slate. (That coronation was “before there were 10,000 podcasts,” Maron admitted recently.)
What made the C.K. episode such a standout? It featured “one of the best interviews you’ll ever hear, providing genuine insight into the mind and career of one of the world’s great comics, as well as thoughtful meditations on success, failure, friendship and fatherhood,” Slate raved.
The two comics worked through their troubled past during the podcast. “The fact that he and I were able to really have a conversation around our relationship and around my jealousy and around how he felt sort of abandoned because of my insecurity, and that kind of stuff… I don’t know,” Maron told Slate. “Dudes don’t talk like that, really, and it was a hard conversation to have.”
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The result was not just riveting listening but a promise to “really try” to mend their friendship. And it worked, for a while, anyway. “It’s good,” Maron said four years after the episode aired. “We’re in touch — and just enough.”
But the reconciliation didn’t last forever. After the New York Times leveled #MeToo allegations at C.K. in 2017, Maron felt betrayed. He’d privately confronted C.K. about those whispers in the past, and C.K. denied everything. But when he publicly confessed his transgressions, Maron let the world know he was deceived.
“I think the tagline on (the later podcast episode) was like, you know, he lied to me about the depth of this situation,” Maron recently told Esquire. “I don’t even know if he listened to it, but I wasn’t willing, nor was anybody really, to go down with him or to die on that hill with him in terms of defending his behavior.”
C.K., in turn, “felt like I betrayed him somehow,” Maron said. “That was it, that we no longer talked.”
Years later, C.K. sent Maron “a weird email” about Lynn Shelton, Maron’s partner who had passed away. It was an olive branch, offering to talk if Maron was open to it.
Maron’s response: “Look, I’d love to talk to you. We’ve both been through a lot of shit. … I’m willing to talk, but I’m not going to address how I handled your problem. You know, that’s done. If you want to start from here, okay.”
That didn’t sit right with C.K. “Well, I don’t know if that’s possible,” he responded.
The relationship was dormant until a few months ago, when Maron was sitting with comics at the back table of the Comedy Cellar. C.K. arrived and joined the group. “All right, well, this is going to be what it’s going to be,” Maron thought. “But I’m not moving.”
The reunion was uneventful. “He’s completely pleasant. Like it was completely gone,” Maron said. “We’re okay. I wouldn’t say we’re friends anymore, but the tension is not there.”
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