“I was like what am I gonna get out of that guy? He isn’t fucked up!” Marc Maron says at the 20 minute mark during his new WTF podcast with funny guy/Jewish heartthrob Andy Samberg.
I find the best part about this interview is how bent of out shape Marc Maron gets from the fact that 35-year-old Samberg is so genuinely well adjusted to life. Through nervous “yeah’s” (where you feel Marc’s head spinning from Andy’s normalcy), he learns that Andy isn’t from Great Neck, Long Island, as Manon assumed from his prototypical “Jewness,” but actually born to a pair of hippies who fled Jewcity, NY for San Francisco in 1970. To Maron’s shock, Andy has a pre-school teaching mom whose fluent in sign language, and a photographer dad (with a studio and EVERYTHING).
Samberg said at the 20.45 minute mark:
“Bill Hader always talks about how we’re a well adjusted generation of comedy. It started with Jack Black and Ferrell, then trickled down into the Poehlers and the Seth Myers’.”
Marc goes on to ask Andy about what it was like being a Bay area Jew at the 21.40 minute mark, and learned that Samberg grew up identifying as a Jew but didn’t get a bar mitzvah. Nowadays he assures Maron that his family is much more observant. This I take, has a great deal to do with the fact that his sister made aliyah and married an Israeli. Now Samberg says, “my family does Shabbat every week and observes the High Holidays. I fast on Yom Kippur.” Earlier in the interview Samberg cracks a joke on how he feels about Israel:
“A friend of mine, Simon Rich, a writer on SNL said a quote I love, “I’m so relaxed in my life, and I can just take any interest I want, and care about whatever I want, because I know as a Jewish man, that as soon as I turn 50, all I’m going to care about is Israel.”
Thankfully, the older Samberg gets, the more Jewish he’s becoming. The two also go into great detail about Andy and Lonely Island (his comedy band with fellow mates Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone), loving hip-hop, and using black humor in his comedy. Samberg gets the nods and handshakes from fellow rappers, and feels he’s done whatever he’s doing, right.
“We went to high school together (Lonely Island) so we’ve known each other a long time. One of things we generally all agree on, is that doing rap’s for comedy if you’re a white person is a very slippery slope, because its not really your place. And also because most people who try it aren’t good at it; they just don’t sound good. In our opinion, we have to a make it sound legit, and have a genuine knowledge and respect for that world. We’re not from that culture, we’re fans of that culture.”
Best highlight came at the 15 minute mark:
Maron says, “When you first came on the scene, not unlike many peers in my age group, the consensus was, who the fuck is that Jewish kid? How often is there a good looking Jewish kid? When does that happen? Maybe that was just me.”
Andy replies, “I hope that it was more than just you, because it makes me feel really good about myself. You want to be the good looking Jewish kid!”
For the full interview which includes more on Lonely Island, how he got into comedy, and Andy’s fascination with the pro-wrestling, see here.
(Photo by Getty)