If you believe that podcasting saved comedy, then Marc Maron is a messiah of humor. After enduring divorces, a flaccid comedy career and losing his job on Air America, in 2009 Maron launched the WTF podcast, recorded in the same garage he often contemplated killing himself in. Today WTF is one of the highest rated shows on iTunes, taking the medium of pop-culture interviews to a highly personal, yet culturally relevant, level of hipster confessionalism.

Now a kind of David Foster Wallace meets Morrissey voice of the “indie comedy” generation, Maron is enjoying a previously unimaginable level of success in the funny business. His recent memoir, Attempting Normal, was released as a double-feature pairing with the debut of his IFC television series, Maron, earlier this year. And the man who has appeared on Conan 46 times will be returning to Denver this weekend, delivering a four-show run at Comedy Works. We caught up with Maron while he waited in line at a barbershop in L.A., to discuss why failure is a good thing, how sobriety affects art, and why we don’t have to worry about him becoming happy.