Transcript
Mark Flanagan (0:00)
Lock the gate.
Marc Maron (0:09)
All right, let's do this a few more times. How are you?
Mark Flanagan (0:12)
What the fuckers?
Marc Maron (0:13)
What the buddies? What the nicks? What's happening? I'm Marc Maron. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. How's everybody doing? I am actually a. A little under the weather, of course, after the stress of everything converging on a point here. And that layered with the cat chaos I deal with daily. And that layered with trying to do some new material. And that layered with, I don't know, my recent doctor's visit. It's a lot. It's just life. I know I'm not special in the stress, but it has been ongoing. And I think I just blew a gasket here. Got a little under the weather. No vid, though. No vid, no Covid. What are you going to do? I guess the weather changed. The big shift in summer to fall in L. A. It's like a four degree shift, but it's chilly in the morning and maybe it doesn't get into the 90s and we're like, who put on your sweaters? Come on, it's fall. It's 78. What are you doing? Get out your long johns. So listen, folks, today I'm going to talk to Mark Flanagan, better known as Flanagan. He is the owner and proprietor of Largo at the Coronet. Right now, here in Los Angeles, you hear a lot of people mention Largo. You hear a lot of people here mention Flanagan. At times, he's like the hub. He's like the center of the wheel in some ways. He's got a lot of stories, got an interesting background. He's an Irish dude, but he is integral to a certain part of the comedy scene in this city. And I would say internationally and also music. And I figured here we're on our way out. This guy is a guy I talk to a lot. I work at his club a lot. And I go way back with the world of Largo to some degree. Certainly now I play there a lot. Early on, I found it very intimidating. It was sort of at the beginning of. In terms of comedy, it was kind of really one of the mainstays at the beginning of alternative comedy and also a mainstay of music. Singer, songwriter type of music. So he's. Here I am back at Dynasty Typewriter here in Los Angeles for two shows in October. That's Saturday, October 11, and Friday, October 17. Nice place. Seats under 200. Intimate situation. These are gonna be more along the lines of riffing through stuff. See what I've see what's on my mind, what I'm coming up with. So it's definitely a workshop situation, but people enjoy that. They like seeing it at the beginning and then seeing how it comes together. You can go to wtfpod.com tour for tickets. There's also a couple of Largo dates there. There are special screenings around the country of the documentary Are We Good? It opens tomorrow, October 3rd in New York and Los Angeles, albeit screenings here in LA on Friday at the Alamo Drafthouse and the AMC Americana down the street, my local theater. Then at the Vancouver Film Festival on Sunday. Back in LA at the Arrow Theater next Friday, October 10th for the American Cinema Tech presentation of Are We Good? And me and Steve Fineharts are doing a moderated conversation with Larry Charles has stepped up to handle that. This is also the last chance to be part of the Kickstarter pre order for the graphic novel WTF is a podcast and we're all still trying to get everyone who orders a framed set of four WTF trading cards. If we pass 250 grand, go to Z2Comics.com/WTF. And yeah, that's the business. That is the business. So let's, let's layer it up here a little bit. First of all, I didn't mean to drop that. I, you know, I went to the, the doctor's office and get a physical. I didn't mean to sort of suggest anything other than that being plant based for two and a half years has not significantly changed my LDL cholesterol. And that's, you know, that's kind of a, you know, that's kind of a punch in the gut because you don't, you don't want to take medicine and you don't want to believe that you can't just fix it. It's a weird thing with medicine. I think it's at the core of people's. One of the reasons that people are so tripped out about vaccines in general is that you don't want to take medicine. But I gotta be honest with you, if you live long enough, everyone's gonna be taking medicine. And medicine is good. It is life sustaining, it is life saving. But as a human being, you wanna believe, like, I can kick it, I can do it. I don't know what that is. I don't know if it's ego or pride or just not wanting to feel like you're compromised physically somehow. So now the big question is, do I just start eating fucking meat again? Do I start, do I get on that statin and just, you know, load up on ribs, roast chicken, you know, salmon. The answer is that is not the plan. Because through being plant based, I have gotten a sensitivity to the sort of realities of consuming animals. And some of it is to the realities of consuming mistreated, overmedicated, you know, sad animals. You're eating a lot of sadness, you're eating a lot of fear. You're eating a lot of just brutal killing. It goes in, man, it go, you know, it's all in there. The poetry is in the DNA of the frightened animal. So that's not the plan. And when I do think about eating something that might be good for me in terms of meat, it's always canned fish. I don't know what that is. I think that's some deep juice shit. Always canned fish. Okay, so Flanagan, who I'm going to talk to, has been the guy at Largo. And early on, before I lived here, you know, I would fly out and Largo was the hip fucking place to do comedy. It was the sort of the, the beginning of the alt scene. You got your Dana Goulds, you got your Proops, you got your Pattons, you got your Galifianaki, you've got your Paul F. Tompkins, you've got your Maria's Bamfords, you got your Garoffs. And, you know, it was the scene. And I would come in from my, from New York with my attitude and my club chops and, you know, also being a defender of the New York alt scene at Luna. And I was, I found it all very intimidating over there. And I never really had a great attitude. I'm still a little weird around sort of alti audiences, though all comedy doesn't really exist anymore. I am still like, you know, I'm like, come on. I'm, you know, at heart I'm just a dirty club guy. But, you know, obviously that's not true. It's just part of my training and part of me lives there. But, you know, I'm as much in the, the nerd NPR world as I am the filthy club world. I try to keep active in all the different worlds that represent all the. The spectrum of me from dirty to thoughtful to dirty thoughtful. I seem to have disrupted the, the helped disrupt the comedy world, mildly with my joke about Riyadh. The weird thing about setting something on fire in that way is that it was a joke and it is kind of exciting on some level when a joke, you know, has resonance and actually has a bit of an edge to it and does provoke, you know, Something either, you know, political or just hypocrisy or, or what have you. I mean, that seems to be the power of a joke. Because I told a joke and started the whole world crying. What did, what did. Like Patton. I was texting with Patton about these jokes and he had a thing that. Let me see if I can find it on my telephone. He quoted Liz Fair. The finest kind of joke is quote, obnoxious, funny, true and mean. Thank you, Liz. Via Patton. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, I'm just, I'm just doing my funnies. Can I just do my funnies? Okay, so look, this talk with Flanagan is a first conversation with me. I'll be honest with you. I. I wasn't even. I wasn't even sure what his first name was. And it's the same as mine. He's just Flanagan to all of us. And he's got quite a story. So you can get tickets and info about all the shows coming up at Largo by going to largo-la.com. and this is me talking to Mark Flanagan. So what's going on? What's in the bag?