Marc Maron Calls Out Rob Durham, the Local Comic Who Wrote a "How-To" Book on Standup

For comedy nerds, standup Marc Maron needs no introduction; for the rest of you, he's one of the artform's leading intellectuals, a "Dostevskyan cut-up" (writes James Wolcott), who is "angry, probing, neurotic and a vulnerable recovering addict" (says the New York Times).

But most importantly for our purposes here, he's a parable of DIY success: With few prospects in 2009, he launched a podcast called WTF, done mostly out of his garage. Now, more than 200 interviews later, it's become "the definitive comedy podcast of record," (quoth Ira Glass) and resurrected his career.

So it seemed like a fairly big deal yesterday, when Maron called out a St. Louis comic, Rob Durham, who recently wrote a how-to book on how to break into standup the traditional way:


But it turned out that Maron was defending comedy-as-artistic-expression first and foremost. Durham's book is mainly about the nuts-and-bolts logistics of making money in the industry.  Are these mutually exclusive?

It's not clear from the Twitter convo that ensued (in which anther comic, Jay Black, caught Maron's tweet and assumed the role of Durham):




So far, Rob Durham himself has not responded on Twitter.

What say you, Rob?