I wanted to like this. I was told I would like this. But I didn’t like this. I knew who Maron was prior to Waiting for the Punch, mostly because I watched Glow, but I have never listed to his podcast. I’ve also never listened to a podcast before so perhaps this format wasn’t ever going to dazzle me.
While each chapter had a distinct theme ranging from family to anxiety to the auditioning process the celebrity anecdotes were organized very haphazardly. I suppose the authors didn’t want to have page after page of the same celebrity talking about the same topic but it was confusing to read a paragraph by one person followed by a paragraph of another person’s story and then loop back to the first speaker when, I don’t believe, they were interviewed at the same time. Overall this felt horribly disorganized which is ironic since all Maron and McDonald had to do was organize their past interviews into a cohesive collection of interviews. He definitely gets people to open up to him. Maybe a little too much?
I think what broke me was reading about Jim Norton’s pee fetish- after that I started to skim around. There are some strong points, particularly the serious one like the comedian who talks about when he was a bouncer for strippers as well as an unlicensed Elmo for children’s parties and another talks about his wife dying from AIDS. I also enjoyed the SNL stories; if you ever audition the answer is “yes, I’ve worked with wigs.”