As President Obama’s helicopter descended into Marc Maron’s Highland Park, Calif. neighborhood for a mid-June taping of the comedian’s popular WTF podcast, snipers were stationed on the roof of Maron’s neighbor’s home.
Maron’s neighbor, giddy amid the commotion surrounding the president’s visit to the Los Angeles suburb, was given a special patch as a souvenir.
As for the mustachioed Maron, who had just returned from vacationing in Hawaii?
According to the podcasting service Libsyn, which produces WTF, Maron’s Obama interview was downloaded 735,063 times in its first 24 hours on iTunes on June 22, and 900,000 times in the first 36 hours, making it the most popular episode of WTF to date.
“I had the president in my garage,” said Maron, 51, upon taking the stage at the Paramount in Huntington on Saturday on his “Maronation” tour. “How can I possibly do an act now? He killed my act.”
In his hour-plus-long set, Maron covered ground familiar to fans of his podcast and IFC network series, “Maron,” including relationship, religion, anger, family and ice cream, his remaining vice following years of sobriety.
“When you really think about life, after a certain point it’s just buffering disappointment,” he said, “but has ice cream ever f—— let you down?”
He even trotted out a character, a snarky blogger typing away at a computer, criticizing his bits about aging rock stars and an Easter weekend set in South Carolina.
It was his third northeast show in as many nights, playing upstate Portchester on Thursday and Brooklyn on Friday before returning to his native New Jersey on Sunday.
Dressed in a plaid western shirt, dark jeans and black boots, Maron set his foot atop a speaker in the center of the stage and imitated the philanthropic U2 frontman Bono, pointing out into the crowd in a moment of improvisation.
It was not the only musician he’d lampoon Saturday, launching into an extended bit about seeing the Rolling Stones for the first time in 35 years later in the set that sent him flapping his arms like Mick Jagger and playing guitar like a subdued, 71-year-old Keith Richards.
