Episode 660 - Brian Kiley / Brian Posehn

**Marc Maron** (0:00)
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All right, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fucksters? What's happening? I am Marc Maron, this is WTF, my podcast. Welcome to all who are listening. Thank you for coming. On the show today, Brian Kiley, this is a comedian that I've known literally since I started doing comedy the first time I did open mics, I think in college. Brian Kiley was there in Boston. He's been a writer on the Conan O'Brien show since about the beginning of the Conan O'Brien show. He's got a book out now. It's a novel.
The Astounding Misadventures of Rory Collins. And you can get that where you get books. We're talking to him in a couple minutes. Brian Posehn is going to stop by because he's got a new movie out. We're going to talk to him a bit. I'll tell you about the play in a minute because it was, I've been going to a lot of theater lately. Well, at least three plays in the last six months. And I love it.
I just, there's an experience available in a theater, in a play, at a play, if it's good, that is unlike anything else.
Like I'm immediately just ripped open, just by virtue of being in a goddamn theater where people are about to take the stage. There's an expectation there. There's an excitement to it. There's risk. There's danger to some degree that actual humans are going to be occupying that space up there and moving through something emotionally. I'm just always blown away. Now, obviously bad theater experiences are bad and the experience of that risk and that vulnerability can work against the actual experience that you're supposed to be having if it ain't working. But I went to see a show, The Humans, by a guy named Stephen Karam and it was devastating.
And this is the interesting thing about theater. I mean, I can tell you it was a great play and I can tell you it was bleak in a lot of ways, but incredibly human, like bleak in the most human way possible.
And it all takes place in one long act, hour and a half or so, had a Thanksgiving dinner and the stuff that was covered, it was so like raw, just the human relationships that were on that stage were so familiar, the way they were set up and the way that it sort of moved through these conversations, there was a bleakness to it.
And this is everyday stuff really. I don't know if I would call it a tragedy because it was all sort of lifted by the fact that there was a family and there was humanity and there was humility and there was some humor.
Like I don't even know if it's uplifting, but I get uplifting by weird things. I thought that Shortcuts by Robert Altman was one of the most uplifting films ever made about people. So I thought it was uplifting in the sort of persistence of these characters and how well defined they were in all their flaws and sort of what barely sort of held them together was the humanity of it. It's hard for me to even explain it, but it was pretty amazing. And I didn't really know, it was directed by Joe Montello. I think that's how you say his name. He's done a lot of stuff. The cast was Reed, Bernie, Jane, Howdy, Shell, Casey Beck, Sarah Steele, Lauren Klein and Arian Moed.
And it was like a daughter who was moving in with her boyfriend in New York in Chinatown. It was the sister who was a gay woman who had recently broken up with her lover, her significant other. It was their parents and then the grandmother who has Alzheimer's and is just sort of mentally incapacitated throughout the show. And it's just sort of the evolution of the dialogue around that family, around who they are and their own personal weaknesses and illnesses and what they endure. And there are funny parts, but it's definitely not a comedy. But it's powerful, man. It's bleak and beautiful. And the ending is completely theatrical and bizarre.