Tina Kakadelis
They say laughter is the best medicine. A well-timed joke can briefly pull you out of a dark headspace, but can comedy be the thing that heals you at one of the worst times in your life? Julie Seabaugh, without hesitation, says yes. When all hope seems lost, there’s a future that can be created from a joke. It’s what pushed her to produce and serve as story editor for the Marc Maron documentary Are We Good?. In 2020, Marc lost his partner, filmmaker and actress Lynn Shelton, to acute myeloid leukemia. At that time, Marc was telling friends and family that he wouldn’t return to the stage, that his days of comedy were over. Seabaugh, a longtime friend of Marc’s, knew this was not the end, but a beginning of sorts.
Seabaugh’s beginning in the world of comedy was a Dave Attell show she saw during her senior year of college at the University of Missouri. She grew up on a farm two hours south of St. Louis, and at the time of the Attell show, Seabaugh was writing about film and music for Vox, but her world fundamentally shifted that evening.
“I got to interview Dave Attell for the magazine, and then he took us all to get drunk afterward. I woke up on my friend Dan’s bathroom floor the next morning,” recounts Seabaugh with a smile. “I was like, there’s something about comedy that people aren’t fully seeing. People were writing about film, music, food, and cars in an artistic manner, but comedy at that time was really being shoved into the calendar listings of alt weeklies. There was no real coverage of the artistry of it. After that Attell show, I was like, somebody should be writing about comedians as artists. They’re not just interchangeable clowns with disposable jokes. There’s something behind all these jokes. I was really interested in where jokes come from, how they’re created.”
Seabaugh founded the print and online comedy magazine Two Drink Minimum based on this ethos. Before Seabaugh fell in love with comedy, she was a journalism student, and has since worked for twenty-two years in the industry. Any journalist or documentarian will tell you that there is immense value in preservation. That we can only grow if we learn from the people who came before us. Seabaugh, above all else, believes that there’s power in the written word.
“I do find that there’s something comforting about being able to communicate by looking at a page. To see that these are the ideas that have been set down. These days, journalism’s in a very weird place. I definitely think more people can understand that there is also art in writing as well. You’re shaping things based on your perceptions of how you see them.”
As story editor of Are We Good?, it was Seabaugh’s job to compile the life story of Marc. Not just who he was on the stage, but the guy off-stage, off-mic. Who is that version of Marc and will he feel comfortable being the subject of a documentary about the immense loss he was experiencing?
“I’ve written, I think, five different pieces on him previously. Everything from Village Voice to LA Times. There was a GQ in there somewhere. I always watched him every time he was at the Comedy Store. He’s one of the reasons I’m there to watch. As a massive fan, I find myself in the happy position of knowing a lot about him,” explains Seabaugh.
“I also knew that, at some point, he’s going to get back on stage again. He’s going to address all this, and it’s going to be the best comedy he’s ever made. That was just in my head. Somebody should make a documentary of this. Then I realized, well, I already know all this, so it should be me.”
“At first, Marc did not want to do it. He said no first. We had to have another conversation about it later, but I kept working on it the entire time. I was putting together the master timeline of Marc’s life. I was already pulling the Instagram clips. He was the first one who did those Instagram lives during the pandemic. They were about cats, quarantine, and Lynn.”
“Then all of a sudden they were about something different. I realized I’d never seen a comic be that real and raw and vulnerable. The way he was speaking about her and her role in his life is just so beautiful. It just struck me that more people needed to see that. Comedians aren’t clowns. The material comes from somewhere, and it’s all about processing what life throws at you. This is just another big example of this. With some adult language included.”
Seabaugh co-directed (with Nick Fituri) the documentary Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11, which featured an interview with Marc Maron. When beginning the process for Are We Good?, Seabaugh felt she needed a partner again, and that would be Steven Feinartz. He directed Bitter Buddha, which also featured an interview with Marc. The two, as Seabaugh describes, had a bit of a contentious relationship that she felt would be a good fit for their new project. A stressed relationship between director and subject isn’t usually what you want for a documentary, but Seabaugh felt confident that beneath the tension was a respect for each other.
“Marc was in the 2021 film Too Soon: Comedy after 9/11, which I co-directed with Nick Fituri. I knew I would need another partner for this one. Talked to a couple other people first, and then approached Steven Feinartz because he had made the Bitter Buddha documentary, which Marc was also in. They had kind of a contentious relationship, but because of that, I knew Marc would yell at him through the camera. That’s why I approached Steven for this.”
“You don’t want a puff piece. You don’t want something that’s just promotional. You want a real, meaningful story. Marc knew about my ability to write stories about comedy that people respond to and he knew that Feinartz had the directing, tech side. I think he again realized there could be something here. He’s a smart guy. That’s why we all watch him. We want to know his thoughts. It was just the idea that he’s going to be himself and he’s going to let it all out there. I had to trust that he would see what we could see, and I was not wrong.”
Part of the magic of stand-up comedy is its fleeting nature. When you see someone on stage with a single microphone and a spotlight, something special happens that can’t be replicated. Even with recorded albums or one-hour specials on streaming services, there’s something irreplaceable about being in the room where it happens. Seabaugh has dedicated her life to documenting and preserving these lightning-in-a-bottle moments of comedy gold.
“When I first moved to New York from Missouri, I was watching the Jerry Seinfeld documentary basically every night. It still made me laugh every time. It’s the same reason people will listen to Mitch Hedberg jokes over and over. You hear them the first time, and who knows what’s happening in that room. It’s a bunch of diverse people, all there for different reasons, and they’re experimenting with trying to make people laugh. When it works, yes, it goes in the set. It becomes part of the act. It can be committed to a special one day. You can keep hearing those jokes, but you start realizing what’s behind them and how they might change just a little bit from set to set, like, oh, that was worded a little bit differently. The punchline was a little different. You start to understand what they’re dealing with in their mind.”
“Personally, I’m most interested in following the process of how it gets there.That’s just been what I like writing about. Turning the dark stuff into something that brings laughter. When you watch a lot of comedians, you might not necessarily recognize that, but when you do, it’s fascinating. That’s why we have more comedy fans than ever. There are more festivals than ever. There are people who follow artists specifically. I think it’s just all because we’re understanding a lot more that this is one of the best art forms there is, and we can use it in a lot of ways to help us feel better about the world around us.”
