Your show airs right after your fellow comedy- podcaster Marc Maron’s TV show, “Maron.” You two are sort of rivals. He seems to prefer stand-up to improv comedy.

Marc actually has a goofy sense of humor, but he doesn’t do that in his own act. His own act is more a personal examination of his own psychosis and born out of a desire to inform the audience about how many 20-year-olds are inclined to sleep with him. In his mind there is a difference between the wacky people and the real comics. I don’t see the distinction all that much.

You recently produced an episode of the web series “Between Two Ferns” that featured President Obama. You jokingly refer to him as “Barack Hussein Obamacare” on your podcast. Did the White House vet you at all?

I kept assuming that two days before filming, they would go: “Oops, hey, we red-flagged you. You joke about the president too much.” And when I was at the White House, they were talking about people that they would not let in because of YouTube videos they did. I asked very frankly, How did I get here? They said that the video was important to them. They wanted to do something authentic.

You have said that the president improvised a bit during the video. Come on, did he really?

He did, yeah. He came with certain insults that he wanted to say [to the host, Zach Galifianakis], and he said them. But a lot of the stuff that we ended up using was when it went off-script.

For a long time, you wrote movies and pilots that didn’t get made. Was that hard, writing into the void?

It was 10 years of just banging my head against the wall. It’s the reason I started doing the podcast, honestly. I figured I’m paid really well to do these screenplays, I’ll just do this thing for fun in my spare time. I wasn’t thinking, If I do a podcast, an emerging comedy network, IFC, is going to hear it, and be a fan of it and try to turn it into a TV show. There’s no way you can plan for that stuff.

I want to go back to Marc Maron.

Oh, boy. I’m sensing you just wanted to talk to Marc Maron.

No — as a way of poking fun at him, you like to ask your podcast guests about the source of the pain that makes them funny. So, can you tell me about that pain in your life?

Here come the waterworks. I was kind of a nerd, and I was bullied a lot, and I found that if I could make the bully laugh he might not want to beat me up. Being funny was a stalling tactic.