Marc Maron is the host of the podcast WTF, which invites famous comedians to talk about their personal lives. Why Maron believes the show has caught on:
I know that most of their lives, their adult lives, they’re sitting around or walking around with notebooks, writing things down. Usually they’re fairly sensitive. Usually they’re very bright. And that makes them poets. That makes them philosophers, in my mind, and also psychologists, to some degree, because they had to put their lives together on their own in a way that’s fairly risky and weird. So the relief that people get from watching comics—and I think that speaks to you, and what spoke to me—is that they seem to have an angle on shit.
I mean, the worst thing about living in this world, in general, is that things get overwhelming, and things cause a tremendous amount of despair and anxiety. With two or three lines, a comic can disarm that and just fucking slay it, just slay those fucking dragons and despair and depression. But as dark as it’s ever going to get on my show, the great thing about comics and our comedic personalities is that they can talk about anything and some part of them is not going to allow it to drift into a ditch completely. I mean, I’ve done that, but most comics don’t.
The Dish 