Marc Maron, Roseanne Barr and Nathan Macintosh Have New Specials

Marc Maron, ‘From Bleak to Dark’

HBO Max

In his new hour, Marc Maron says he refuses to outgrow blaming his parents for his problems. “They did it,” he grumbles, concisely. His graying hair bouncing off a dark leather jacket, Maron, 59, has remained a vital comic voice by staying in touch with his inner brooding teen. And yet, don’t be fooled: Maron is maturing. His comedy has become more intricate, varied in timing and tone, and politically astute. After decades of leaning over stools, his years of touring theaters — and perhaps film work — have turned him into more of a showman, with a repertoire of small scenes, satires (his spoof of the TED Talk is pitch perfect) and act-outs.

The emotional centerpiece of his new special is the 2020 death of his partner, the director Lynn Shelton. Here is where he really shows his evolution, because he handles this passage with a light touch, humbly and without the melodramatic negativity of his title. What stands out is his lack of philosophizing or waxing poetic. There’s a lot of art, including comedy, that exploits the gravity of death. And why not? Our greatest play, “Hamlet,” is about a neurotic, grief-struck young man who can’t stop obsessing over the death of a loved one. But Maron brings an older man’s perspective. He tells us he’s not the victim. Shelton is. He calls his loss ordinary, common. Can art help? People send him “The Year of Magical Thinking,” and it does nothing for him except make him compare himself unfavorably to Joan Didion.

What does help, he says, is “the Jewish thing.” Maron has long been fascinated by religion and spirituality, but this hour is his most Jewish by far, featuring the most jokes on the religion, including punch lines about the Holocaust and antisemitism. He says he finds solace in the Jewish epithet “May her memory be a blessing.” This phrase, dating at least to the Talmud, contrasts with the Jewish stereotypes of neurosis and kvetching. Maron pokes fun at the idea of him doing an emotional Jewish one-man show about the death of his girlfriend, but in a way, he has done it — or at least, his version. Looking to the wisdom of religion is perhaps the most hack move possible, but one of the things you learn as you get older is that clichés exist for a reason.

Nathan Macintosh, ‘Money Never Wakes’

YouTube

When it comes to stand-up specials, it’s a “best of times, worst of times” situation. There have never been more being made, released and available to a global audience than right now. According to Sean McCarthy’s newsletter Piffany, there have already been 55 released this year — more than one a day. While most hours are terrible, rote or entirely mediocre, there are gems that would have remained entirely obscure in previous eras.

Take Nathan Macintosh, an inauspicious-looking blond guy dressed in khaki pants, a white T-shirt and a button down. His new hour did not get picked up by any major platform, but you can watch it free on YouTube and, if you’re like me, convulse with laughter. His jokes won’t translate well to the page because his delivery is so eccentrically goofy while still managing a momentum that keeps building and building. His main mode is end-of-your-rope exasperation, with eyes popping, voice squeaking and a jittery physicality. He can be funny on mute.

The panic in his voice is a perfect match for his preoccupation: The confusing way money works and the infuriating inequities of class. That makes him sound didactic, but his jokes stay close to the ground and unexpected, sympathizing with much-mocked figures like landlords or subway drivers. There’s a novelistic detail in his description of his own apartment, with rats scurrying above the ceiling. (“Have you ever heard rats above you having a better life?”) His self-loathing bit on losing money on crypto is a wonderful time capsule of our moment.

But his funniest jokes are about the pampered rich, whom he portrays as aliens speaking to one another and oblivious of everyone else. In dark comic set pieces, they are forced into contact with ordinary people, who must treat them with extreme deference. He acts out one scene in which a rich person complains about his chicken being cold at a fancy restaurant. The manager says with practiced professionalism, “Look, we’ll have the waiter murdered in front of his family.”

Roseanne Barr, ‘Cancel This!’

Fox Nation

In the oral history “We Killed: The Rise of Women in Comedy,” Roseanne Barr explained how she adjusted her stand-up act in the 1980s to fit in with comedy clubs. “I had to make it less political and more mainstream,” she said. This clearly worked. Barr became one of the most successful comics in history, turning her fed-up housewife persona into one of the best sitcoms of the era. But now, several years after an offensive tweet led to her being fired from a reboot of that show, Barr has adjusted again by becoming more political, aggressively courting right-wing audiences as a conspiracy-minded victim of cancel culture.

Her new special, which arrives on the Fox Nation streaming service, feels like a mix of rally and fan convention, with some stand-up sprinkled on top. Barr, who alternates between long pauses and flashes of anger, gets an applause break from saying “Baby blood drinking Democrat community” and a big laugh from “I don’t want to talk to no Hillary donors.” It’s a balky production, with abrupt edits and occasional tangents that belong more to the green room than the stage, like an extended gripe about doing promos for her sitcom.

It’s the culture war material, though, that gets her crowd fired up. She berates #MeToo victims, suggests that taking the vaccine will prevent you from getting pregnant, and in bemoaning the decline of men, orders the ones in her audience to tell their wives and girlfriends to sit down, shut up and make them a sandwich. Barr says she plans to offend, but this has become another pander, since obviously her crowd loves the grievances, the resentments. She even clarifies that she likes doing promos for Fox.

Watch Barr’s early sets and you will find not only a quick comic mind, but also tightly written jokes. Neither appear here. Of course, it’s not just Barr who has changed. Comedy has, too. The scene is more political, polarized, desperate for outrage. Jim Jeffries prefaces the trans jokes in his new Netflix special by saying he’s doing them because he wants the press that Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais received. I’m sure he’d say it’s a joke, but I believe it. When Barr trots out a stale gag about gender, riffing on the question “What is a woman?” she gets a predictable roar. It’s a reminder that Barr once ran for president, and how much comedy and politics have blurred. Cheap nostalgia can be powerful in both arenas. At one point, Barr jokes, “The world has changed a lot since I was alive.”