Comic Marc Maron brings his act to Carmel to find humor in the toughest, most pressing questions of our time.

Marc Maron is a self-described “mid-level celebrity.” He’s been in stand-up comedy dating back to the 1980s, he’s appeared in films and television. For a spell in the 2000s he was a radio show host on Air America, which attempted to be a comedic, left-leaning foil to the right-wing domination of the political airwaves, and in 2009 – way before it was cool – he launched a podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, in which he holds free-ranging conversations with people that are often more famous than he is: Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, Robin Williams – it’s a long list.

Maron also has some comedy specials to his name, and he’s currently refining 90-plus minutes of material down to an hour for an upcoming HBO special filming in December.

Maron’s comedic style is conversational, and he doesn’t shy away from highly charged topics, political or otherwise. He dives right in to try to make sense of it all, and to use comedy as a means to come to some sort of peace with the world. Maron’s acts tend to have a prophetic quality to them, and his last comedy special, End Times Fun, aired on Netflix in February 2020.

To his faithful, Maron is an icon. He says out loud what many people are thinking, but perhaps are hesitant to wrestle with. “I don’t know if I’m going to sell any tickets with this interview,” he notes. Speaking about a script he and his writing partner sold to FX, Maron explains that a producer who had read the script said, “‘Hey look guys, this is great. I don’t have any specific notes, but is there any way we can get this from bleak to dark?’”

Weekly: End Times Fun dropped right before the world was upended. Do you take any responsibility?

Maron: I do not think I mentioned the virus so I can’t be connected. But I think the general tone of it, and certainly climate-wise, and GOP-wise, and fascist-wise, I think there was a lot in there that seemed to be a little prescient. I don’t know how that happened, it was just what’s going on in my mind.

In that special, you made a joke about not knowing if Trump would leave the White House peacefully if he lost the election. How have you processed what’s happened since?

I’ve just been very specific and careful to acknowledge that what we’re dealing with is a fairly shameless and organized fascism that’s kind of multi-pronged and multi-faceted. It’s just this weird mixture of late-stage capitalism and economic policy, things playing out exactly the way capitalism planned, and now things playing out exactly the way radical Christians have planned, and that sort of meshing with straight-up, single-party-rule populism. It’s just a perfect storm of the worst kind. That’s what I feel, that alongside climate, alongside of me aging, is all sort of in the mix. I’m just leaning in and finding a certain humor in the truth of it, but I don’t have a forecast, and I don’t know what’s ahead. But I do know the markers of what we’re in, and I can’t say I wake up feeling everything is going to be okay, ever. And now the water thing, I’m obsessed with the water running out. I was just in Colorado and I thanked them and told them to turn the spigot back on.

You live in LA but are in Canada at the moment, and you said you might want to relocate?

It’s just an active fantasy. When I’m up here, a lot of what’s in the cultural environment [in the U.S.] – that being dark, and hostile and unfriendly and destabilizing – it just isn’t here. I don’t feel it here. I used to think it was boring, but now I feel like, “Well, maybe I’m ready for this.” People seem more grounded, more accepting, and maybe I’m generalizing, maybe I’m romanticizing, but I just know that it all kind of rolls off my back when I get off a plane in this country. I don’t know why.

I don’t have any plans – I’m not a big planner. I’m just ultimately looking for some peace that I’d like to experience before I die or before the world dies.

How would you define your brand of comedy?

Everybody knows that we’re in trouble on many of the fronts I’m talking about. That apprehension, that fear, not knowing what to do in the face of that, feeling somewhat powerless, and maybe if you’re hypersensitive and profoundly liberal, you’re going to beat yourself up in the face of that. In that zone of fear and self-judgment come amazing possibilities for humor. And that’s where I live, that’s what I do.

MARC MARON performs at 8pm Friday, Oct. 7. Sunset Center, Carmel. $55-$99. 620-2048, sunsetcenter.org