Did Joe Rogan Wait to Fire Back at Marc Maron Only After His Podcast Ended?

Marc Maron should have seen it coming.

In the weeks leading up to the end of his long-running WTF show, Maron made the podcast rounds as a guest and let his uncensored opinions fly. “I did a round of them for a while, and it started a massive amount of shit everywhere,” Maron said yesterday on the Past Times podcast. 

“A massive amount of shit” occurs when you tell the world that Joe Rogan has “a tight hold on the enlightened meathead,” as Maron did on the Bad Friends podcast this fall. 

He also went after the entire Austin comedy scene. “Whatever they represented in terms of policy and and it's not a stretch, it's like they won. Trans people are frightened. They have no ability to get healthcare anymore and they're afraid of being alive and have no freedom left. So that's done. When do you stop with the jokes? When do you stop with the jokes?”

That’s a lot of responsibility to lay on comedians’ doorsteps! But Maron wasn’t done. “And immigrants. They're being ripped away from their homes and they're all terrified. So that's done. When do you stop with the jokes? It's one thing to pick on the vulnerable and the marginalized, but they're down. Why do you got to keep hitting them? Unless you're a hack.”

Maron said he wouldn’t go on Rogan’s show himself at this point. “I don't know that we have a lot to talk about because of my idea of what he's done to comedy. And I don't think it's great.”

Rogan is too full of healthy supplements to take that kind of criticism without a response, of course. Here are some bodyslams on Maron from the former kickboxing champ’s October 15 podcast:

• “He's sad. He wants other people to hurt.”
• “He's pathologically jealous. He's literally mentally ill.”
• “He likes to talk shit about you, and then you confront him, and he says you're right.”

Rogan also claimed Maron turned on him after The Joe Rogan Experience became bigger than WTF. “He started talking shit about me long before all this Trump stuff … just the most recent iteration of this bizarre thing he does with people,” Rogan said.

“King Rogan … decided to criticize me for talking shit about comics and then talked shit about me for an hour,” Maron said on the Past Times podcast, noting the irony. “It was really something.”

“Don't think that we haven't been gleefully watching the way you went out with a flamethrower,” laughed co-host Gareth Reynolds. “But then once you were done, he started firing shots when you no longer had a cannon.”

That's right – Rogan waited to talk shit until Maron had signed off, noted co-host Dave Anthony.

“The day after!” Maron replied. 

It’s a point not lost among comedy fans, who noted that Rogan acolyte Andrew Schulz also piled on Maron, but waited until Maron put down his WTF bullhorn before airing the rants. 

Despite his criticisms,  Rogan says he's good with Maron. “If I saw him and I talked to him, we were cool, I'd give him a hug,” he said on JRE before launching into an angry rant about healthcare for trans people, proving everything Maron said all along.