Marc Maron doesn’t believe business should come before morals. It’s exactly why he severed ties with Bill Maher and finds the consistent platforming of controversial comedians on platforms like Netflix to be considerably dangerous, he said on Pod Save America, per Variety.
“I always had a problem with his tone,” Maron said about Maher, “and it happens with some of the other boomers, there’s this desperate chasing of relevance that changes someone’s mind in terms of how they approach what they do and also kind of makes the whole undertaking feel desperate.”
Maron previously appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher, but has not joined him for an episode since 2015. “He’s got good joke writers who know how to write for his tone, but I can’t see past the desperation and what he’s willing to do to stay in the conversation,” he said. In May, Maron criticized Maher for aligning with “some of the things that Trump is doing,” saying, “It’s like, dude, you’re a bitch.”
Maher joined Donald Trump for dinner at the White House earlier this year. “As you know, 12 days ago, I had dinner with President Trump — a dinner that was set up by my friend Kid Rock, because we share a belief that there’s got to be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” Maher said on Real Time. He noted that before the dinner, Trump posted “a bunch of nasty crap about how he thought this dinner was a bad idea.” Still he had a good enough time, saying “the guy I met is not the person” who shared those erratic sentiments the prior evening.
For Maron, there’s no room for normalizing fascism. “Fascism is good for business,” he said, shifting his aim towards Netflix. “Netflix will just, you know, co-opt anybody that can take that algorithm. I used to do a joke about it — Netflix can become ‘Reichflix’ very quickly.“
Maron named the streaming platform’s relationship with Dave Chappelle as a prime example. After coming under fire for making transphobic jokes in his Netflix special The Closer, Chappelle returned with another special with the streamer, The Dreamer, which also took stabs at the trans community.
“When they had pushback from the trans community about Chappelle, they realized after several days that that community was not going to affect their bottom line at all. And they cut ‘em loose. That is how fascism works in business,” Maron said. The WTF podcast host isn’t giving them a pass for spotlighting pro-LGBTQ+ content in tandem. “Ultimately, who’s getting the big deals? Which shows stay on the air? You know, what do they keep repeating?” he asked. “That’s them saying, ‘We got this other stuff and we know there’s a few of you, but we’re throwing you a bone. So, shut up.’”
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Later this year, Maron will end his WTF podcast after 16 years. “We’re burnt out. And we are utterly satisfied with the work we’ve done,” he said in June. “This doesn’t mean I’m never going to do something like this again. Doesn’t mean I’ll never have talks like I do here, or some kind of podcast at some point in time. But for now, we’re just wrapping things up.
From Rolling Stone US
