B@B@Bananas

Nearly two decades ago, stand-up comedy was anointed by critics and the new rock 'n' roll. Perhaps it was our hangover from the Reagan years, but for a while it seemed as if something in the water in the mid 1960's had created a kind of Generation of the Damned -- an entire army of side-splittingly funny people who built stand-up into an entire industry. There had always been funny guys; the "Lenny's Children" of comedy; guys like Richard Pryor and George Carlin, who represented a radical departure from the "Take My Wife Please" school of borscht belt comedy that was popular during my childhood in the 1960's.

When Mr. Brilliant and I first moved in together in 1983 and got cable for the first time, it seemed as if one could just turn on Comedy Central at any hour of the day or night and see someone who'd make you laugh. For a while it was as if comedy were a huge surprise box, and every time you opened it, there'd be someone new standing there, saying something funny. I suppose the warning sign was when the outrageous id of Sam Kinison evolved into the hatefulness of Andrew "Dice" Clay. Kinison was never my cup of tea, for obvious reasons having to do with gender, but even I could see there was a certain performance artist method to his madness. Clay was just an other obnoxious Jewish guy taking out his hatred of his mother on women at large.

Today, comedy clubs seem to have a bit of a heartbeat again, however feeble. The problem is that while there are still any number of men and women standing in front of microphones, few of them are actually funny. It's not that the broad themes of stand-up -- sex, family, work, and politics -- have become stale, or even that it's no longer possible to find humor there; it's more that like crude oil, it's become more difficult to get out of the ground and there are more people out there trying to mine it who just aren't up to the task. These are complicated times, and the simple joke-response-joke-response model of comedy just doesn't cut it anymore. The guys who can make us laugh today are the ranters and the raconteurs -- the guys who take a machete to the increasingly thick jungle of bullshit that is life in the United States in the "naughties" and get down to its purest level of absurdity -- guys like Chris Rock, Lewis Black, George Carlin (still) -- and Marc Maron.

We in the Brilliant household had never even heard of Maron prior to his debut as co-host of Morning Sedition on Air America Radio, for all that he's toiled around the comedy circuit for a number of years. But since these days I tend to change the channel as soon as I see a guy in front of a microphone telling a joke and then grinning amiably waiting for a laugh, I'd never heard his work. But Marc Maron, wired on Dunkin' Donuts coffee, cathartically spitting out bile right out of the gate at 6:05 AM every day, has become a kind of Billy Graham for the disaffected, cynical left -- which is why watching his show at the Bananas Comedy Club in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ last night was such an odd experience.

During the show, Maron covered the expected litany of subjects -- neurosis, growing up in an insane home, past drug use, sex, and of course, the current state of political and world affairs. This was clearly a Maron crowd; his biggest applause line of the night had to do with something he'd like to do to Karl Rove. In just over a year, this worried-looking man on the cusp of middle-age, free-floating anxiety almost visibly emanating from him, wearing his Jewish neurosis on his sleeve for the whole world to see, has accumulated a rabid group of not mere fans, but followers. Watching and participating in the cheers that accompanied his already-iconic catch phrases, such as "neocon death cult" and "Christofascist zombie brigade" was not much different from attending Howard Dean meetups last year -- only with booze and a leader who really IS the kind of nut the media only CLAIMS Dean is.

It's Maron's manic nervous energy and ferociously articulate delivery, in which words fly like bullets, that make him even more effective as deliverer of a message in person than on the airwaves. But while a comedy club is only going to hold a few hundred people, Air America Radio reaches millions of people -- and that's where the real potential power of a messenger like this comes in. Sure, there was the one florid, pig-faced guy, who obviously had no idea who he was going to see, who was so enraged at Maron's dissing of President Bush that he had to be escorted out of the club before trouble started, but for the most part, this show was a Gathering of the Faithful. Maron told a story of people calling into the show in the early days of Air America last year from their basements, thanking him in hushed voices for being there, and then getting off the phone lest their family members find out. This kind of thing may make for good comedy, but there's more going on here than meets the eye.

When the idea of "liberal talk radio" was first bandied about, the knock on such an endeavor was that "liberals aren't funny." Over a year after the network's launch, that notion has been shot to smithereens, mostly by the Morning Sedition crew. This program may be a collaborative effort among the hosts and the talented staff of writers, but the guy who is the load-bearing wall for this particular Church of Keeping Your Sanity Through Humor In Insane Times is Marc Maron. By making people laugh while he gets his point across, and developing such a devoted following, Maron has achieved a kind of power to create change in this country of which I'm not sure he's even aware yet. And maybe it's better that he not be. Putting a little more pressure on a guy this neurotic -- and this funny -- could be tragic. We need him too much now to take that risk.