Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Marc Maron: End Times Fun’ On Netflix, A Comedic Prophesy For Any Belief System

Marc Maron certainly wasn’t thinking about the coronavirus when he recorded his new Netflix comedy special, End Times Fun. And yet, here we are. Are these the end times anyone prophesied? Regardless, Maron has some ideas about that. So let’s explore them!

MARC MARON: END TIMES FUN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist:  After 35 years in the game, Maron jokingly concedes he has reached merely “mid-level celebrity.” What’s mid-level? If three guys see Maron on the street, the comedian claims one will love and adore him, while the other two will have no idea who he is. Leaving the adoring fan to vainly attempt to explain Maron to them. “I didn’t work 35 years for this feeling,” Maron quips.
And yet. So many more people recognize or know Maron now than even a few years ago, even if that awareness, name/facial recognition may not come from his stand-up. He has a memorable supporting role in the most-watched thing on Netflix over the weekend, Spenser Confidential, which follows his critically-beloved turn on hit Netflix series GLOW. Not to mention his brief but vital appearance in last year’s Joker movie. Or his long-running popular podcast, WTF with Marc Maron.
But it’s all got to come to an end sometime. Maron’s nowhere near the end of his comedy career, thankfully, but this 70-minute performance finds him contemplating where we’re all at now, standing or sitting at a collective turning point, living in crisis mode, whether our apocalypse is brought about environmentally or politically.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Directed by Lynn Shelton (who worked with Maron in her 2019 indie film, Sword of Trust), she captures Maron in his best-ever light, so to speak. His preferred posture remains a Rodin-like stance on the stool. But rather than deliver his thoughts to a booming theater or audacious arena audience, he draws us closer to him in this intimate space, the 270-seat REDCAT (Ray and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in downtown Los Angeles. If anything, it’s as if the late great George Carlin had done an MTV Unplugged.

Memorable Jokes: Maron’s opening gambit takes the general populace’s lack of awareness about him as an opportunity to question what exactly he knows and how he knows it, and whether it’s all based in hearsay. “That’s how brand marketing works, and also fascism, we’re finding.” But he also reckons it’s as true for his daily vitamin intake as it is for the vocal minority boycotting vaccines, and understands that the way we develop a new belief may have uncanny origins at times.
He mentions Joe Rogan’s podcast more than he mentions his own, but not in a cynical or condescending way. No, no. Even though Maron concedes, “I know I’m gonna get a little flak for that comment,” he shouldn’t. All good clean fun about how information spreads in 2020, and about what we choose to believe in. Religion. FOX News. The Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maron doesn’t discourage you from whatever belief system keeps you keeping on, but at the same time, it’s all fair game for a little wry ribbing.
Including men. Before his set climaxes, Maron describes himself as 85 percent woke (the other 15 percent he keeps to himself, which mathematically makes him all woke?), and digs in on how men and our preoccupation with sex lies “at the core of a lot of disrespect” for women.
But as the title suggests, Maron spends the bulk of his time onstage contemplating how we’ll all cope (or choose not to) with the end of the world as we know it (will we all be fine?).
Our Take: We don’t have Carlin around today to tell us how to act or react to the insanity around us, although comedy fans and others still gladly share clips of the legendary stand-up which prove either prophetic or eerily fitting today.
We do have Maron. And Maron is not the curmudgeon he used to be. As he gets older, his comedic persona has evolved and elevated to a higher, subtler, satirical plane.
So he can, at once, poke fun at Trump in an observational way without getting too political, while also mocking liberals for their previous and sometimes ever-present passivity. If the rule of law breaks down, do we break down with it, or if we choose to hold strong, are we normalizing it? If we live to see the global climate destroy us, what did we do to prevent it, exactly?
He filmed this before the COVID-19 coronavirus began spreading globally, so it’s comedy karma doing Maron a solid, perhaps answering his fundamental question:

“I don’t know what it’s gonna take to get everybody, you know, to…you would think at this point that we’d…haven’t we been entertained enough? Weird thing for me to say, but Jesus. Like, isn’t there something that could bring everyone together and just realize, like, we’ve got to put a stop too, like, almost everything. Right? Oh my God! What would it take? Something terrible. That’s what brings people together. Nothing good. Occasionally a concert outdoors. But that never really goes anywhere. It’s gotta be something bad and big. Get everyone to snap out of this, fuck, whatever it is, trance…”

Instead of coronavirus, Maron wonders how we’d react if the sky caught on fire, still clinging to our respective belief systems. Living in California, he already knows how accustomed he and his neighbors have become to nearby wildfires that it doesn’t take any leap of faith or imagination to picture Maron and others taking selfies with natural disasters. Or to put our faith in Sean Hannity or Marvel superheroes or Jesus Christ.

With the glaring exception of his closing bit, a prophecy involving Mike Pence and the apocalypse which Maron concedes and warns, “It’s gonna land kinda bad,” most of Maron’s satire is delivered so soft and subtle that it goes down smoothly.
This is Carlin level stuff, clips you’ll watch for years and years.
Our Call: STREAM IT. This is Maron at his best. He’s calm, cool, collected, a comedic leader for this crazy time in our lives. You’ll be able to come back to clips of this special years from now and still marvel at him. We learned through his podcast earlier this year that Maron is Brad Pitt’s favorite stand-up comedian. Now he’s poised to become yours, too.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Marc Maron: End Times Fun on Netflix