Marc Maron

Maron was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of mother Toby Blum and father Barry Ralph Maron, an orthopedic surgeon. He has a younger brother, Craig.

Maron is from a Jewish family, originally from Poland and Ukraine, including Drohobych. He lived in Wayne, New Jersey until he was six. Maron's father joined the U.S. Air Force for two years for his medical residency in Alaska, and so Maron and his family moved there. When his father left the Air Force, he moved the family to Albuquerque, New Mexico and started a medical practice. Maron lived in Albuquerque from third grade through high school. He graduated from Highland High School.

In 1986, Maron graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English literature.Maron first performed stand-up in 1987 when he was 24 years old. His professional comedy career began at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles, where he became an associate of Sam Kinison. He later moved to New York City and became part of the New York alternative comedy scene. During the summer of 1994, he appeared several times on Monday open-mic night, coordinated by Tracey Metzger, at the now-closed Greenwich Village location of the Boston Comedy Club. He auditioned unsuccessfully for the 1995 Saturday Night Live cast overhaul and attributes being passed over to being high during a meeting with show creator and producer Lorne Michaels.

Maron continued to be a stand-up comedian and also began to appear on television; his voice was used in episodes of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, and he hosted Short Attention Span Theater for a time. He also recorded half-hour specials for HBO and Comedy Central Presents as well as comedy showcases like the Cam Neely Foundation fundraiser, which also featured performers such as Jon Stewart, Denis Leary and Steven Wright. He frequently appeared in the live alternative stand-up series he had organized with Janeane Garofalo called Eating It, which used the rock bar Luna Lounge in New York's Lower East Side as its venue, from the 1990s until the building was razed in 2005.

His first one-man show, Jerusalem Syndrome, had an extended off-Broadway run in 2000 and was released in book form in 2001. In 2009, he began workshopping another one-man show, Scorching the Earth. According to Maron (in Scorching The Earth), these two shows "bookend" his relationship with his second wife, comic Mishna Wolff, which ended in a bitter divorce.

In May 2008, he toured with Eugene Mirman and Andy Kindler in Stand Uppity: Comedy That Makes You Feel Better About Yourself and Superior to Others. In January 2009, a collaboration with Sam Seder, which had begun in September 2007 as a weekly hour-long video webcast became Breakroom Live with Maron & Seder, produced by Air America. Until its cancellation in July 2009, the show was webcast live weekdays at 3 p.m. Eastern, with episodes archived for later viewing. In its final incarnation, the show was informal, taking place in the actual break room of Air America Media, with the cafeteria vending machines just off-camera. This meant occasional distractions when Air America staff and management alike would occasionally come in for food and drink. Maron and Seder held court in an online "post-show chat" with viewers, in an even less formal continuation of each webcast, after the credits had rolled.

Maron's stand-up act is marked by his commitment to self-revelation and cultural analysis. He is particularly known for relentless on-stage exploration of his own relationships with family, girlfriends, and other stand-up comedians whom he has known and befriended over his years in the business. In October 2013, Maron released his first hour-long special through Netflix, Marc Maron: Thinky Pain. Maron would follow this with another special, More Later, which was released in December 2015 through Epix.

Kliph Nesteroff's 2015 book The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy is dedicated to Maron.

His 2023 special From Bleak to Dark was named New York magazine's "No. 1 Best Comedy Special of 2023."