Last month, veteran standup comedian and pioneering podcaster Marc Maron was honored for being publicly sad. And not as a joke. He was given The Good Grief Award from a support center called “Our House,” whose mission is to normalize grief.

Maron, a not-so-prototypical Jersey tough guy, has been talking about grief, among many other vulnerable topics, with noteworthy people since 2009 on his trailblazing podcast “WTF with Marc Maron.” For nearly 1,500 episodes, Maron has laid himself bare in an Ordinary Joe yet still highly entertaining kind of way.

Lately, he’s talked about the death of his beloved aunt Barbara, “the cool aunt” who let him smoke growing up. About his subsequent addictions (he’s been clean since 2000). About his ongoing issues with food and body dysmorphia.

“I am a man with profound body issues,” he told “WTF” listeners. “I was made that way by my mother, who was consumed with having the perfect body. There were points when she would tell me, ‘I don’t think I could love you if you were fat.’”

Even today, at age 60, Maron is still seeking comfort in his own body. “There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t experience food shame for eating something,” he said.

Most poignantly, he’s been working through his grief since the 2020 death of his partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, from leukemia. In advance of his four standup shows this weekend at Comedy Works South, I asked Maron how he’s so comfortable being such a wide-open book.

“From the very beginning, I have found that when you engage with your full self, people are going to reveal something about themselves, too. That is the human experience, isn’t it?”

We’ve all got our junk, as the saying goes. And most of us box it up and bury it in the ground. But talking publicly about his junk makes normally guarded celebrities willing – even wanting – to talk about their own. With millions of people listening. “WTF” reports about 55 million downloads a year.

One riveting example was just two weeks ago, when former child TV star Jennette McCurdy (“iCarly“) talked about how her memoir came to be titled “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” Maron has talked to everyone from Robin Williams to Keith Richards to Nicole Kidman to Joan Baez to Barack Obama, but the conversations that mean the most to him are the ones where it’s just two people working things out.

“I have found over the years that sharing these things that we keep hidden is really a fundamental problem for most people,” he said. “Everybody’s walking around destroying themselves from the inside with grief or the idea that they’ve done something horrible or that they’re weird, and they’re scared. But I’m comfortable in talking about myself in most ways. That’s just the way I’ve always worked, whether it’s on stage or not. I put myself out there. I’m all in.”

Maron believes the people who gravitate toward what he does “are usually a little emotionally volatile – or feel sort of put upon by the world, but they don’t necessarily want to live so publicly with that. Because of that, I think a lot of people who listen to my stuff feel validated or less alone in the world. And that’s about the best you can ever do, you know?”

One reason Maron’s conversations seem completely organic is because they are. He doesn’t consider himself a  journalist, so he doesn’t come in with a set of pre-written questions. He does some research, sure – especially when someone has written a book. “But what usually happens, I’m finding,” he said, “is that on the day of an interview, I’m usually in the shower and I’m just kind of letting my brain put everything together that I have filled it with. When I find a zone or an idea or an understanding of the person, I lock into that – and then I just sort of start the conversation.

“It is kind of a high-wire act, and it does cause a bit of anxiety. But I do OK with it because that’s sort of the way I do standup, too. It’s just my nature.”

This podcasting enterprise all began 15 years ago in Maron’s garage, he said, and out of economic necessity.

“I think the style evolved out of the desperation that was there at the beginning. There was no way to make money, and my career wasn’t going that well. So it really started with me talking to my peers about me. And a lot of it was trying to bring myself back into the community in a real way.”

Maron’s pre-sobriety stories are legendary. He freely shares his early, drug-fueled adventures with his audiences – like when he found himself getting high with some circus clowns. He’s made some enemies along the way. That’s part of the reason he started “WTF” in 2009: To work on himself.

“I had felt that I was kind of a (bleep)-hole at that time, so there was a lot of apologizing at first,” he said. “The way I would characterize those first hundred episodes is me having celebrities over to my house to talk about my problems. That meant I was always going to be part of the conversation, which to this day occasionally annoys some people. They say things like, ‘Why don’t you let them talk? ‘Why are you interrupting?’ And it’s because, well, that’s the way conversation works. And if that’s not your bag, then don’t listen.”

One of Maron’s landmark episodes was in 2013, when he talked with late Boston comedy icon Barry Crimmins about how childhood sexual abuse shaped both his political worldview and his comedy. Crimmins told Maron that comedy was a defense mechanism for dealing with his trauma. Maron says that’s true for many comics.

“Look, I think the impulse to be funny is complicated,” he said. “I do think comedy is innately a defense mechanism, but it also functions as something that’s very disarming and therefore seemingly the opposite of that. Because comedy is also a very good vehicle to communicate ideas that are complex and sometimes frightening and overwhelming. I’ve always thought the noble path of comedy is to make things a little simpler within the vehicle of a joke that might open a window of understanding. To me, that’s a profound thing. It’s like a poetry of sorts.”

Maron, perhaps best known as an actor for “Glow,” an Emmy-winning TV series about a group of L.A. women who take up wrestling in the 1980s, has released five stand-up comedy specials over the years, most recently “From Bleak to Dark,” which premiered on HBO in February. It must have been popular.

While I was interviewing local author Heather Hach (“The Trouble with Drowning“) last month about a recent trip home, she said she revisited her youth by going to the Duran Duran concert at Red Rocks – and she described the experience by quoting a line from Maron’s special. “It was like what Marc Maron said about going to see the Rolling Stones – that the best part was leaving early,” Hach said with a laugh. “It was like that.”

Maron was tickled to hear that story. “I think that idea resonates with people of a certain age,” he said. “Yeah, beat the rush.”

Maron said he is using these Denver dates to work out some all-new material – and where better than Comedy Works?

“I still am of the belief that the best place to see a comic is a comedy club,” said Maron. “I have been going to Denver to do comedy for a long time now, and one of the reasons is that the Comedy Works downtown is one of the best rooms in the world – and I’m not alone in thinking that. It’s almost too good.”

He’s a little nervous, he admitted, about performing for the first time at the Comedy Works in Greenwood Village. “But Denver has always been good for me,” he said.

It should be noted that, on stage and on the air, it’s not all heavy with Maron. Hardly. I mean, he just told his podcast listeners the very funny story about why he went to Tulsa and urinated on crazed friend Sam Kinison’s grave. (I’m not telling you here.)

Whatever special sauce he’s tapped into, it’s working. I mean, any podcast that is still yakking on after 14 years is astonishing. I asked Maron what he thinks is the reason for his longevity. Naturally, the question made him a little anxious.

“It’s a tricky thing to be charming and completely insecure at the same time,” Maron said. “When William Hurt died (in 2022), I texted my friend, Dan Vitale: “You can only get away with life so long.”

He’s not kidding. Vitale died six weeks later.