“I’d been sober for about a year, and on that plane ride back, totally f---in’ got s---faced. Totally relapsed,” the comedian said.

Marc Maron bombed a comedy show so hard, he was sent home from Australia: ‘I felt myself leave my body’

"I'd been sober for about a year, and on that plane ride back, totally f---in' got s---faced. Totally relapsed," the comedian said.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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February 24, 2026 9:23 p.m. ET

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Marc Maron at a Skokie, Ill., comedy tour stop on March 28, 2025. Credit:

Barry Brecheisen/Getty

- Marc Maron once booked a month of shows at a club in Australia in the early days of his standup career.

- After a week of previews, the first official show didn't go well: "All I could hear in a room full of 400 was the embers of my cigarette burning."

- After bombing spectacularly, Maron was sent home to the U.S. by the club's owner: "I just drank the whole way home."

Marc Maron once performed a comedy show so terrible that it cost him three weeks of work — and forced him to fly on a 22-hour flight around the globe.

"I was sent home from Australia cuz I bombed so hard," Maron recalled on Eric André's podcast *Bombing*. "It was the f---ing worst."

Maron explained that he was booked to headline three weeks of comedy shows (plus one week of previews) at a club down under in the early 1990s and admitted that he only had 30 minutes of decent material when he took the job, which required far more than that.

"So I fly to Australia, I get there, and there's a billboard of me, like a painted billboard of me, with a fake quote about my act, like, 'This guy is a star,'" he remembered. "And so right away I'm like, 'That's not true!' And I knew I was gonna have to stretch, but I thought I could handle it. And I don't even like being away! I was freaking out on all levels: Didn't have the confidence, didn't have the act, do not like to travel."

The comedian said that he was frazzled by the show's inclusion of an intermission, as he wasn't accustomed to performing at venues that featured a break in the middle.

"The first time you deal with that, you're like, 'What the f--- are you doing? You're stopping the whole flow!'" he said, noting that his headlining act came after two openers. "So I'm just sitting there, watching this show going, 'I'm f---ed. I'm so f---ed.' And I go out there the first night and struggle. It's okay, I stretch at the end, but it's okay. And I go through a whole week of previews where it's just getting worse and worse."

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Maron explained that his act reached a new nadir on the official opening night of his run at the theater.

"I get out there, I'm the headliner, and I'm smoking — you could smoke then — and some guy yells, 'Where'd you get that jacket,' and it was an American dude," he remembered. "And I was so f---ed up in my head confidence-wise that it just shut me down."

From that moment forward, Maron said that he couldn't get a single reaction out of the hundreds of audience members.

"There was a point where all I could hear in a room full of 400 was the embers of my cigarette burning," he said. "It's not just a silence, there's like a suction to it. And I felt myself leave my body. It was literally like, 'I'm gonna go watch from over there.' And then I get off stage, and the owner comes up to me, and he has that look of someone who just saw an accident, he's like, 'Are you okay?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, I guess I'm okay.'"

Marc Maron in West Hollywood in October 2023.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty

The club's owner called Maron into a meeting the next morning.

"This is a week in, I'm supposed to do three more weeks," Maron remembered. "And he goes, 'I don't think this is working out.' And I'm like, 'Okay.'"

Maron said that the owner pulled the plug on the rest of the schedule.

"He goes, 'I think maybe you should just go home,'" he recalled.

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After André asked if he got paid for the first week of shows, Maron responded, "I don't even f---in' know. I don't even think I cared. I knew I had to play along and be like, 'Oh really? I think it'll get better.' So I said that, but in my mind, I'm like, 'Thank f---in' God.'"

The comedian also said that the fallout from his Australian failure had a significant impact on his well-being.

"I'd been sober for about a year, and on that plane ride back, totally f---in' got s---faced. Totally relapsed," he said. "I just drank the whole way home."

Watch Maron's full anecdote on *Bombing* above.

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