BONUS Producer Cuts - Marc Monologue Bonanza
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Hey, Full Marin listeners, how's it going?
This is Brendan, the producer of WTF.
Thankfully, today I can talk.
That wasn't the case yesterday.
I had completely lost my voice from a cold that I have.
But I can talk today, which is why you're getting this producer cut episode a few hours later than you normally do.
But also, I'm not going to talk in between the clips here.
So I decided to modify this a little bit today.
instead of clips where I need to kind of set up what's going on I wanted to talk less and just have you hear what you're hearing and so what I did was put together a collection of stuff I cut from Mark's monologues over the month of July this is just stuff from July there will be some stuff in the future that you'll hear from the month of August as well as from former guests who were on the show but this is just stuff that I had to take out of Mark's monologue for time reasons in fact
You'll hear in the very first clip, he makes mention about how the monologues are normally 10 to 15 minutes long.
So he knows this, and yet he still sends me sometimes monologues that are 30 minutes or so.
So there's usually some decisions I have to make, and these are those decisions, things that I think...
will be entertaining to you, but just for time reasons, don't get included in the show.
And in order, these are from the episodes that came out on July 20th, July 24th, July 27th, and July 31st.
So that's just some context of where they came out.
Otherwise, it's just Mark.
It's your friend Mark talking in a way that you are familiar with.
And I think of all the people who appreciate...
the kind of stuff he's going to talk about in these clips.
It's you, the full Marin subscribers.
So enjoy.
These are producer cut outtakes from Mark's monologues in the month of July.
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You know, I think we all know each other here for the most part.
And you know what I'm going through, generally speaking.
Obviously, I keep some things to myself.
Obviously, I'm only compartmentalizing the things that I want to tell you.
I mean, this is a 10 to 15 minute riff up front.
And there's still 23 hours, 45 minutes in every day.
Every day.
And I do this twice a week.
So you're getting about a half hour of me talking about my life kind of rendered down from, you know, however many hours that is.
I don't know why I'm telling you this.
It's just I think I'm just thinking about it myself out loud.
I don't know what your life is like, but I generally imagine that most of you, you have friends, you have people you talk to.
And if you really think about how much you know about their life and how much they know about yours, it's about 0.01%.
Isn't that odd?
Because a lot of times I'll have guests in here and they'll talk to me for an hour straight and I will have a full conversation arcing through like with an arc throughout their life and career.
And many times this is this is a true thing.
I've talked to guests after I've had them on many times people come up to them and say, I've known you for 20 years.
I've known you for 30 years.
I've known you for 50 years.
And I didn't know that.
How is that possible?
Isn't it interesting?
Uh,
how little we really say to each other and how well we assume to know the other person.
It always keeps it interesting.
And now as I get older, more stuff is coming out.
So the conversations I have become, they're taking a different shape and I've had to really start considering how to, uh,
Apply that to my life and to my comedy and to the broader understanding of who I am in the world.
I don't know if any of you are working on that project.
Maybe you're too busy.
I am relatively busy.
But, you know, when I'm not going to supermarkets and shopping for food or thinking about food or chasing the fucking nicotine dragon with my lozenge habit that I've reengaged with and my caffeine habit, which balances it out, just this never-ending weird speedball of caffeine and nicotine to jam my dopamine and kind of get everything active and justify it is like, you know, I've read some clickbait.
I'm not even going to say studies.
We should all just be honest about, you know, what we're really going on when we change our lives dietarily or vitamin wise or or a mild drug wise.
You know, where are we really getting the information?
How much research are we really doing?
I just get hearsay and quick bait.
And I've said that before.
It's hearsay and quick bait.
You know, I've been doing this vegan thing for like over five months, it feels like.
And if somebody hadn't said, are you taking that B12?
A friend of mine in New York said that.
Do you do the B12?
I'm like, what do you mean?
Well, you got to do the B12.
You're not getting B12 anywhere.
And eventually, you know, your limbs are going to go numb.
I'm like, oh, all right.
Well, I'll have to get that supplement going.
But my point is, how much do you know yourself?
And I guess that's, you know, either you're going to.
kind of put a ceiling on that and say, like, I'm good.
This is who I am.
Or you can allow things to kind of come in and kind of like spark and trigger and illuminate things that you might not even know about yourself.
There's always sort of this weird blind spot that we all have about who we are in the world and maybe even who we are to ourselves.
Yeah.
I feel like I'm setting up some sort of documentary series.
Anyway, listen, a couple of things happened over the last week or so.
I don't know.
I don't socialize.
Sadly, this show functions as both a
a way for me to socialize with people I respect or don't know or meet.
And it's a big part of my life and it's part of my emotional life and my spiritual life.
But I don't go out as much with people.
I spend time with my buddy Jerry sometimes.
I spend time with Kit, obviously.
But I don't always go out and socialize.
So it was really sort of a, it's a weird thing when I get invited anywhere.
I've talked about this before.
And I consider me going to the comedy store as my social life because, you know, there's enough comics I kind of like or kind of know or really like or whatever.
And I hang out for a little while and say hi to everybody, get that human connection.
But out of nowhere, this was funny because it was the day before the Emmy nominations dropped.
And however you people, you know, processed my talk about disappointment about the Emmy nominations, look,
It is what it is.
And I've obviously been up, you know, wanting to be considered for a long time.
And it's just a seasonal thing, man.
I'm not feeling sorry for myself, but and I certainly know how to take the hit.
But, you know, it's just part of my life.
But it wasn't like I wallowed in it.
I'm not sitting here going like, God damn it.
But I don't believe I talked about this the day before the Emmy nominations dropped.
I probably already recorded that that thing.
Is that possible?
How does it work?
Well, I get this, you know, this text out of nowhere.
I get this text from John Mulaney, you know, just to hang with a few comics.
And and I obviously the timing was what it was.
I knew we were both nominated, you know, but he's putting together this dinner.
It's like he told me it's like Kroll, Nick Kroll, Joe Mandy, American Dan Levy, Jezelnik.
He said that Spade was going to drop by.
You know, it was just a group of of comics.
And I was like, yeah, that sounds good.
Just at an Italian place.
I'm like, that sounds great.
He's like, yeah, we'll just hang out and have some dinner.
It was very nice.
And I thought, you know, it's probably just going to turn into a congratulatory dinner for your nomination and me not being nominated.
And he said, well, just by you saying that, I think you put a jinx on both of us.
But the point is.
It did sort of turn out—it might have been a couple days before the nominations, but it did turn out that I didn't get nominated and he did.
But we go to this dinner, and the thing is, it's like, we didn't even talk about it.
It came up briefly, like, congratulations, you know, what happens now?
I think Jeselnik was asking him.
But the point is—
It's just sometimes I have to really appreciate the community I come from and the legacy that we are part of, which is stand-up comedy and knowing comics my whole life and having this group of people that I don't necessarily know that well, but we know each other to be who we are and what we are, which is comics.
So we're sitting around and it turned into exactly...
What you think would happen, what's supposed to happen is it just turned into this storytelling session over Italian food, a lot of laughs.
And still, there's part of me, it's like, I'm the oldest guy here.
Well, Spade's getting up there, but he only hung out for a little while.
But it literally became...
And I get into a very fuck it.
I don't give a shit.
I'll throw people under the bus.
I'll tell you how I really feel.
I'll do these stories, which is a good lubricant for other guys who might be a little more diplomatic than me.
It kind of opens up the floodgate.
But it was kind of a blast.
We had a great time.
We had a great meal.
And literally, you know, afterwards, John was like, that was fun, man.
Good stories.
And it was like, this is what we do.
And the older we get, the deeper reserve of stories there are.
And it was just sort of like, well, this is who we are.
This is what we do.
It was kind of a great time.
I don't know if it'll ever happen again.
And if it does, I'll have to kind of figure out some more stories, I guess.
But we had a pretty good time.
There's another thing I wanted to bring up is...
I was doing... Oh, the vegan thing's going fine.
Thank you for asking the me in my head that was wondering if anyone was wondering that.
It's fine, but I think I fucked up and I might have ingested a bit of dairy.
Not upset about it, but it didn't... It's funny, it's not...
It's not like drugs where you're sort of like, it hasn't been that way for me.
I accidentally ate some cheese.
I might have accidentally eaten something.
I ate mango with sticky rice and I was just so excited about it at the Thai restaurant.
I didn't even process that.
The sauce they put on it, I'm sure, has cream in it.
And I just fucking wolfed it down.
And after the fact, I'm like, holy shit, what have I done?
But it's not like drugs.
It's not like a relapse where now I'm like, I'm just...
waking up in the morning and drinking a quart of cream every day.
But I had to, is it a slippery slope?
Sort of like, well, fuck it.
I already blew it.
No, it was sort of an accident or at least a desire that wasn't overridden by my awareness of what I was eating.
It was just sort of like, I'm going to eat that.
And I fucking ate it.
I've been eating a lot of things.
I've got to be careful because I'm realizing there's a lot of ways you can eat pretty shitty as a vegan, obviously, but it's a dessert thing.
Like I made a banana bread, a vegan banana bread that was amazing.
I used walnut oil, no dairy, and there were chocolate chips in there and walnuts and walnut oil and bananas.
Every time I bake something, I realize it's just because I want to just have a few bites and then get it out of the fucking house.
But sometimes it's hard to unload it.
So now I'm dealing with that.
I'll be all right.
I'll be all right.
And I guess I did set this up earlier and I, and I do want to talk about it about the nature of me going over my life and my past and my experiences and, and sort of opening myself up to evaluating, you know, things that happened in my life and also digging deeper and finding the things that happened in my life that may have sort of disturbed me.
and created the personality I have or the mental liabilities and emotional liabilities I have as an adult and sort of like get into them a little bit.
And I realized this is the last frontier for whatever I'm going to do as a stand-up in a way.
The last two specials, I was pretty specific about a lot of things, you know, climate change, fascism, politics on a personal level.
my own sort of like life in relation to these things.
And also my, my, my fears and, and realizations about who I am as a twice divorced childless man.
Again, these are all conversations I've sort of built over time and, and do appear in many of my specials, but I don't know.
I think that in dealing with grief that I realized that there is a place to sort of disarm the
things that aren't talked about.
And some of this has been, I've realized around, you know, trauma that the, you know, trauma resolution, trauma, disarming trauma through comedy in a very sort of focused and real way, because there is no real conversation, not only about grief, we found out, but just about mental health and,
And I think a lot of people are wary of mental health treatment.
And I think that a lot of it's not available.
And I think that a lot of people just suck it up.
And many people live in sort of a chronic state of PTSD or just sort of whatever personality they've sort of built out of the pain of early trauma or trauma that they've had in their life.
They double down on that.
You know, either you're going to go the victim route or you're going to go the fuck you route.
And somehow that cuts on political lines, too.
So it started to dawn on me that, you know, maybe this personal exploration of what we all sort of kind of walk around with and that the nature, the notion that, you know, how we engage with the world is definitely a template.
that we've put in place over our particular wounds.
And, you know, I guess you could say suck it up, life is life, but there's also the idea of processing it and then kind of, uh, uh, disarming it through, through comedy and realization and, and cognitive, uh,
behavior change.
But I just realized like, well, you know, I've touched on this a lot in my comedy and certainly I've had jokes about it in the past, but maybe it's time to sort of really kind of focus on it and open up the aperture a little bit.
So that seems to be
The direction I'm going with that.
Also watching a lot of movies and letting them have a profound impact on me as a grown person.
These Mike Lee at the BBC films are really kind of just the nature of that.
And I said this before, there was a time when characters were explored.
I watched The Misfits the other night with Clark Gable and.
Montgomery Cliff and Eli Wallach and Marilyn Monroe.
And that is like, it's not an overall great movie, but the third act is kind of mind-blowing in terms of the male type, be it toxic or willing to change in relation to, you know, Marilyn's character.
I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's a bit...
dubious in there as to how it was shot and framed, but the writing is Arthur Miller, and it's totally deep and provocative in a way that I just don't experience with many films today.
And also, the age difference, I think, between Marilyn and Clark Gable at the time was similar to the age difference I'm working with.
So
with Kit.
So it, it, it did, uh, I wouldn't say it served as a template or, or a harbinger, but, uh, and I don't think I'm going to, uh, wrestle a horse to the ground, uh, and then let it go just to feel like I have control of, uh, of, of my own decision-making in relation to, uh, uh, uh, uh, a woman's, uh, uh, sensitivities.
But, but, you know, I think metaphorically maybe, but, uh, it's been great watching those movies.
I've become an easier laugh as I get older.
And I think I've become funnier.
I don't even know why I was so funny this weekend.
And I can never put my finger on it.
And I know it's also so fleeting and tentative with me in terms of what I think about what I'm doing.
But the comedy store this last weekend was just crazy.
The audiences were so nice and open and excited to laugh.
It felt like cheating.
I almost thought everybody was killing.
But...
I went on after Ryan Sickler the other night, Saturday night in the original room, and I don't think I've ever sat and watched his comedy, but he just killed, man.
He fucking leveled the place with applause breaks.
And no matter how long I've been doing this, going up after that, you kind of get this moment where you're like, oh, God, now I've got to reconfigure the entire room in a matter of seconds.
But it worked out fine.
We both had good sets.
And it was... I don't know, man.
There's a couple of bits I'm working on that I'm very excited about.
They're just jokes.
But that's what I do.
I'm doing the long-form stuff at Dynasty Typewriter.
We're doing one more day of that.
Or one more Tuesday.
That's tomorrow night here in L.A.
Where I'm kind of moving through these darker...
deeper ideas.
But then, you know, at the comedy store, and I've said this before, it's, you know, it's a workout room.
It's a gym room.
You do them 15 minutes and you kind of get locked into a few jokes and you tinker with them and you play with them.
And it's been, uh, it's been fun.
Saw Dreesen the other night, Saturday night, Tom Dreesen, who was just on this show.
And, uh,
He just stopped by to say hi.
You know what's great about the store these days is that, and it's like the old days, but I ran into Tom Rhodes.
Tom Rhodes, my old buddy, he opened for me at Dynasty last Tuesday, and we kind of did a two old guys on stools thing where we told stories.
Tom wanted, you know, he's trying to get back on his feet a little bit, get some new material going, so he asked me if he could open, and
He was feeling a little shaky, a little shaky on his comedy feet.
So I said, well, because he said to me, he said, you know, there are these stories I want to tell about us.
I'm like, I was thinking about that, too.
Why don't I go out there?
I'll bring you up.
We'll hang out.
We'll tell the stories.
You'll get comfortable.
And my audience will get comfortable with you.
And then you do the thing.
It was great.
It was a great time.
But Hannah Einbinder is with me tomorrow night.
But Driesen came by the store, and he was telling me about the feedback that
to his most recent appearance here about the mob stories, which people loved.
He said, I can't believe it.
Just great comments.
So many comments.
People email me.
All the comments are great.
And all I'm thinking is like, but you didn't hear from the mob, right?
The mob didn't reach out, did they?
Huh?
Did the mob reach out?
But yeah, so the Comedy Store has been nice.
They just passed a bunch of new regulars.
So I probably will be pushed out in a matter of weeks and have to find another place to work.
I hope not.
I don't think that's going to happen.
But still vegan, still going strong.
I know you're curious about that.
I'm getting more dubious about supplements.
Go see your doctor.
Preventative health care.
Preventative...
Checkups staying on top of your own health not putting it off because you're afraid or in denial Get out there go do it.
You know, I hope you have health coverage Even if you don't figure out a way to pay for a thorough checkup and blood test Do it just so you're you're not surprised we're all going to be
relatively surprised uh when uh as my buddy says uh uh you know it's in the mail for everybody and how it's going to come we don't really know but you you might be able to get a heads up and uh hold back some of the stuff so do that for yourself
I don't know, man.
I don't know anything about AI.
I don't engage with stuff.
I don't know.
There's part of me, I guess, that's nervous about it.
I know some people think it's a tool, but any unregulated tool becomes something that eventually becomes some unbridled monster.
that figures out a way to infuse itself into our brains and lives.
And I guess that's already happening with targeted marketing and some other things.
But I know that somebody had apparently, you know, asked an AI me some questions and then sent me the answers.
And I was like, wow, that's kind of weird.
And I thought like, well, hell, maybe I can understand how it's a tool because you could just sort of work together and
You know, I can work with the AI me.
And I guess that's on some level what the writers are kind of fighting for.
It's like, you know, you can't just have the AI do it, but maybe if they've written enough and there is an AI version of them, they can partner up with themselves, with their AI self.
And I imagine I could partner up with the AI me and maybe together through collaboration, we could come up with a
A sort of more perfect me that's half AI and half me.
And I'm not sure that I'm not half AI already.
But then it becomes about, well, how do you get paid for the AI?
And I don't know what the deal will be negotiated, but I imagine they'll try to get away with paying the AI me in crypto.
And I don't even know what that means, but I know it doesn't happen in reality.
So maybe the AI me can have an entirely kind of like live large in the world.
In the fictional world that it inhabits with the cryptocurrency, which I don't know anything about.
Zero.
I know nothing about it.
I know that it's kind of over.
But I remember people going like, you get into crypto.
I'm like, no, I don't even know what that is.
I just like I like knowing where my money is, what it is involved with and not taking too many chances.
So I can't I'm not part of that.
But.
I guess I got to educate myself on this, on this, this AI business specifically because this is, you know, what happened to like, wasn't there a time where people were like, you know, in case, you know, something changes in the future where they might be able to sort of have an active life after they're dead.
They, they cryogenically froze their heads.
Does there still like these places around, are there places around that just have these, uh,
cryogenically frozen heads of people that could afford to have their heads frozen in case they could be reattached at another time.
Uh, so they could come back to life or live forever.
Who's in charge of the, is there a doc on that?
There should be a doc on that.
Does somebody, is there a doc on the security guy at the cryogenic storage facility?
There must be, please.
Somebody tells, tell me there is, because it seems that the one thing that, that AI is lacking is, uh,
consciousness in a way, or I'm wary to use the word soul, but some sort of organic, they're not tethered to anything organic.
So maybe, I don't know.
It just feels like those heads are never going to be used.
Someone should do a doc on the heads floating in the fucking frozen goo.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah, you know, I have no idea who's still with me and what's still happening out there.
It's a very weird thing I start to realize, especially in going through my records and seeing all these bands...
that are known to some people, unknown to most people, plowed away, did the thing for their people.
That this idea, the idea that creativity, uniqueness, authenticity is not exactly what I'm trying to say, but people that fight to be themselves in their music and their work, they're not for everybody.
And that doesn't need to be what you strive for.
There is this.
We've talked about it before.
There's this idea.
A lot of meathead sheep, a lot of pseudo libertarian followers, a lot of tribal dum-dums.
who believe they're empowered, have no particular point of view of their own.
But there's this idea of, you know, what is comedy?
What isn't comedy?
Who's killing it?
Who's crushing it?
Who runs the world?
Who's making the big bucks?
But ultimately, when did it only become about that?
You know, you want to make a living, but when did that become the impressive thing when it comes to the arts?
most of the people, a lot of the people that I've loved and liked, you know, are off, they're, they're, they're marginal or they're a cult thing in a way, or not everybody knows them or they're not appreciated.
You know, this sort of weird kind of, uh, Manichean, uh, this or that who's got the mostest sort of sense of winning, uh,
is fundamentally sports-like and fundamentally capitalistic.
And it means nothing.
If anything, the guy with the most is actually the most unoriginal, most boring, and the most status quo.
Once something becomes mainstream status quo and maintains itself there, it's hard not to become hackneyed.
But if you've got people cheering you on like you're a fucking team, why quit?
Right?
Winning.
But some of the most interesting things happen outside of that.
Outside of that process.
I didn't get into this to win or to be a team leader.
I got into this mostly because I didn't know what else to do.
Always felt outside of everything.
And I was filled with fuck you.
That's why.
And then you start to realize, all right, well, now that I've fucked you enough and I've got this territory that I can call my own, I have a certain amount of skills in place, what are we going to do here in the fuck you circle?
I guess the reason I'm talking about this is I've been, as I mentioned before, I've been watching a lot of old Don Rickles and old television.
I thought initially it was because
It was something I used to watch when I was a kid, you know, the roasts, or if I could stay up for Johnny or just seeing these old guys do the thing.
But then I sort of become fascinated with Rickles' style.
And, you know, what is it?
What is it?
Like, because, and I've talked about this before, I know, but a lot of the jokes don't land.
A lot of them don't make sense.
And a lot of them are fundamentally inappropriate and racist, right?
And I guess there was a time where if he insulted the full spectrum of people, it was sort of the Lenny Bruce idea, which was co-opted, I think, by Rickles, equal opportunity offender.
But I think that came.
They were probably working at the same time.
But the idea was that there's something humanizing about making fun of everybody equally.
Yeah.
But then as time went on, culture shifts certain things.
It's not even a matter of being offensive.
They're no longer the way the culture talks about those things out of respect for the people that were being talked about.
And that's something we've talked about a lot, and it's still relevant.
But there's still something that compels me to sort of keep processing Don, right?
Now, what I've learned over the past bit of time is that Don is really Don Rickles is an extension of Milton Berle, which makes sense in the way that they make fun of people and in the tone and in the face.
But I've also been listening to a lot of dead boys, too.
And and and yesterday I had the New York Dolls on repeat.
So these were original American punk rock acts.
And the Dead Boys, some of their songs, dirty, toxic stuff.
But great.
You know, I can contextualize.
I can keep people within the context of their time, of the paradigm that was, you know, manifested.
by the great patriarchal nuisance of that era.
I can't, you know, I don't have any problem.
I don't find it within me.
I mean, Christ, I look at the, the, the span, the spectrum, the arc of my career.
And at the time when I was like pushing the buttons and trying to get as dark as possible and as offensive as possible, I did that.
That was part of the fuck you.
That was part of the fuck you-ness of finding my space.
Takes a lot of fuck you to find your space.
Creatively.
But why am I gravitating towards early punk rock and dirty punk rock and Don Rickles?
Because there's something about the engagement.
And I think there's something about because Rickles was all crowd work.
So whether he's saying something racist or not, he's saying it to the face of the person and they have a choice of how they're going to receive that.
But there is something about the way he took chances and the way he stayed in the moment and the way he was willing to fail and just the full on amount of fuck you in that guy.
Same with the Dead Boys, same with the New York Dolls to a certain degree.
So there's something I'm kind of craving, I guess, that I kind of let go of to a certain degree or evolved out of is a bit of fuck you.
It's always in there, but I hold the line.
So now I'm wondering, you know, what am I...
What am I fueling myself up for?
Why am I filling myself with this stuff?
What does my heart and brain know that I don't know in terms of where I'm going with my act or my creativity or the things I want to say?
Why am I needing to fortify myself with full-on fuck you artists?
I don't know.
I guess time will tell, but it seems to be something I need to do.
Okay.
Okay, that wraps that up.
And, you know, if you heard in that last clip, he was talking about Don Rickles and the Dead Boys.
And that was one of those good examples of something I told him I was cutting out.
And he said, oh, I'll do it again the next time.
And in fact, by the time he did it again, he had reached a completely different conclusion about those things he was listening to.
In fact, said it brought him to a realization that he had to deal with it in therapy.
So I thought that was kind of interesting and interesting for you to hear how that started.
And we'll do more of these in another few weeks.
I have some stuff from the month of August as well as things from past guests that didn't make it onto the shows.
So we'll bring you some producer cuts as well as all the other full Marin bonus content right here for you subscribers.
Thanks a lot.
Boomer lives!