Good One: Marc Maron

Joking about his girlfriend's death was the only way to process it.

- JESSE DAVID FOX

IT'S A TROPE for supposedly transgressive comedians to show how willing they are to go there by introducing a word they are not supposed to say, then saying it a bunch of times. In his new HBO special, From Bleak to Dark, the comedian, actor, and podcaster Marc Maron offers an alternate vision of what difficult material looks like-by talking, and making jokes, about the unexpected death of his girlfriend and collaborator, the director Lynn Shelton. She died of undiagnosed leukemia in May 2020, and in the special's centerpiece, Maron offers a portrait of grief that explores the possibilities that she was reincarnated as a hummingbird and was haunting him through theater-lighting systems. Getting people to laugh at how social distancing made the mourning process lonely and awkward: Now that's provocative.

I once spoke to you about doing comedy after 9/11, and you said, "There was no 'too soon,'" and that comedy was a way of "processing" the tragedy. Did talking about Lynn feel similar?

I'm not sure I was right about that. I processed my second divorce in a one-man show that was not ready to be seen. It was raw and terrible. But some people like that shit. Louie Katz, a comic, said, "Man, that helped me. I was going through a breakup, and I listened to it a lot." I was like, "Thank God! You might be the only one!"