I’m a little late to this but I wanted to point out the incredible hypocrisy of liberal comedian Marc Maron in his recent tirades against the “anti-woke” comedians.
In case you don’t know, Maron is a left-wing comic who recently shut down his podcast and is dropping a new comedy special but on the way there he’s been breathing fire against the comedians who dare speak out against left-wing extremism and excesses.
He’s been especially histrionic about those comedians who are aligned with Joe Rogan.
In an interview with Howie Mandel, Maron says accuses these comedians of being hacks and says that they should shut up about censorship because it was never really a threat, and they have won the election so they can stop complaining about “cancel culture.”
It’s actually an interesting interview worth listening to, even if Maron comes off as a crotchety old man whining about kids these days not respecting their hoary elders. And I will admit out of intellectual honesty that I slightly agree with Maron on some of his points and observations.
One of the concessions I will make is that some on the right commit the same sin that they accuse those on the left of making – they make poor jokes seeking applause from people who agree with them, rather than laughter from everyone.
In spite of this, he seems to fall into the same fallacy when complaining about “anti-woke” comedians, especially when having to do with the transgender agenda. He thinks they should shut up now just because Trump won, and somehow, he thinks people going against the transgender agenda is “anti-democratic,” which is an intellectual sleight-of-hand he’s trying to pull to equate the democratic party with the democratic system of governance.
But what is crazy is what he says at the end of another clip from that same show.
In the video where he talks about why he left podcasting, he ends with a story about Andrew “Dice” Clay. The story is pretty funny and worth listening to but the content really doesn’t matter – what does matter is that Maron calls Dice a friend and adds, “Dice is Dice, you know, I love him.”
So…. wait a minute.
Andrew Dice Clay was the originator of anti-woke comedy long before anyone even coined the term “woke comedy,” or even the term “woke.” Whatever you think of his comedy, there’s an entire documentary about how Dice made fun of gay people during the AIDS crisis and attacked minorities and immigrants on his way to becoming one of the most popular comedians ever.
I am not necessarily saying that Dice deserved to be cancelled but it’s CRAZY for Maron to crap his shorts crying about these modern anti-woke comics while praising his best buddy Andrew Dice Clay.
But this is EXACTLY what he’s whining about – people look the other way when someone close to them says something questionable or holds questionable beliefs. And he mercilessly attacks those people, while completely ignoring that he’s doing the exact same thing.
And that shows that his tirades aren’t because of his principled stand against “anti-woke comics” at all. It’s just a sad old leftist comic who is bitter that comics with vaguely right-leaning and libertarian tendencies have found an audience while he’s still struggling.
There’s a bunch of other irrational arguments he made that I can easily destroy, like the fact that he would never tell libs to stop fighting after they won the last election, or that he’s absolutely wrong about the continuing threat against first amendment freedom of speech, or his deceptive framing of the transgender agenda, but… I have said enough about his faux-intellectualism for now.