Is This Anything?
A review of Camille Bordas' THE MATERIAL
For a decade or so after the one-two punch of Judd Apatow’s Funny People hitting movie theaters in July 2009 and the first episodes of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast dropping two months later, explications into the lives of stand-up comics became something of a niche American industry. Everywhere you looked, there was a new movie, podcast, or television series reminding us—not that we needed it—that the lives of the people on stage making us laugh were actually, if you can believe it, quite serious indeed.
In the first Trump term alone, we got Pete Holmes’ Crashing on HBO, Ramy Youseff’s Ramy on Hulu, Maron’s own Maron on IFC, the 70s Comedy Store throwback I’m Dying Up Here on Showtime, and Billy Crystal and Josh Gad in The Comedians on FX, the network that arguably kicked off this television trend with the success of Louis CK’s Louie, which premiered in 2010. There were also countless WTF imitator podcasts, the birth of the Netflix Stand-Up Special Industrial Complex, and a four and a half hour—four and a half hour!—documentary about Garry Shandling. Every question anyone could have possibly had about what it was like to be a comedian in just about any era was being answered on an almost nightly basis on every cable network, streaming service, and podcast-carrying mobile device.
In 2024, the wave has crested. Streaming services are buying so few stand-up specials that comedians now release their hours for free on YouTube, and as the entertainment industry has contracted in the wake of such cataclysms as the COVID-19 pandemic and the actor and writer strikes, so has its patience for half-hour dramedies starring comedians who play themselves (Pete Davidson’s Bupkis notwithstanding).
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the runway has been cleared for Camille Bordas to drop The Material, a novel that traces an eventful day in the lives of the students and teachers at a Chicago university’s stand-up comedy MFA program, an idea so absurd I can’t believe it doesn’t exist. Comedy “schools” have offered potential recruits the promise of a formalized route into show business since the popularization of improv and sketch programs at Second City in the Seventies, and the major cities are rife with clubs and theaters that are happy to take the money of budding young performers and older folks who have “always wanted to give it a try.” You can’t get an MFA in stand-up (yet), but such a program would be only a modest heightening of the offerings at, say, the Upright Citizens Brigade, the Annoyance, or the Groundlings, just to name a few.
And if such a program did exist, it would almost certainly start in Chicago. Bordas told the Chicago Review of Books that she picked the Windy City as a setting not for its association with the major improv theaters but simply because she’d had to move to Florida for work and missed her old home. The accident is a happy one. Chicago’s freezing temperatures and second-string, not-quite-the-coast status give it a rich dual identity in The Material. For the students, it’s a remote training ground, a hideout in which they can log their 10,000 hours without the prying eyes of the hardened professionals in New York or the agents and managers in Los Angeles. It’s also a big enough city to make sure there are enough audience members to fill the seats at their showcases.
For the teachers, it’s a barren tundra to which they have been banished for one of any number of crimes. Either they’ve failed to achieve a level of fame such that they can’t turn down the money and stability of a teaching job, like Dorothy, or they have, as is all too common in comedy circles, gotten canceled. The novel hinges on the arrival of guest lecturer Manny Reinhardt, a superstar akin to Louis CK whose habit of proposing marriage to women after he sleeps with them has just come to light, as has his punching of another comic one night at a stand-up club (though, to be fair, it sounds like the other guy was asking for it).
Bordas’s sensitivity to these details is one of the book’s biggest strengths. I can personally attest to much of their accuracy. I spent six years before the COVID lockdown enmeshed in the New York comedy scene, first in improv at the UCB Theater before trading it in for the grind of stand-up open mics. Reading The Material made me wonder if Bordas had been in some of the same rooms, scribbling away unnoticed at the bar. Sure, there are some things she gets wrong—a comedian’s time on stage is a “set,” not a “bit”—but there is so much she gets right. I read The Material’s opening chapters with the queasy guilt of the sinner in church who thinks the sermon is all about him.
How could she know this? I wondered as Artie, the closest thing we have to a main character amidst Bordas’s roaming third person narration, wonders how much mental preparation is necessary to succeed at his performance in workshop later that day:
He was supposed to make his classmates laugh at some point in the next two hours, but it was okay to be focused on something else. Maybe he’d find that not thinking about his act so close to showtime would make him a better comedian. It was counterintuitive, but intuition was overrated, he thought. Intuition was for lazy people. It was for people who didn’t want to think too hard.
This is pretty much how young comedians think: the nervousness, the self-talk, the flailing attempt at a positive spin. Artie is at the beginning of his journey; he doesn’t even know what being good at comedy is supposed to feel like. It’s an uncertainty all too familiar to anyone who’s done an open mic or taken an improv class and been shocked at how unnatural it can feel the first time (or the first hundred).
Another of Bordas’s achievements in The Material is sociological. She is excellent on charting the types of personalities that are drawn to pursuing comedy, the various shapes and sizes of holes it can fill. So many of my comrades I recognized here—Artie, the handsome try-hard whose unquenchable earnestness stands in the way of his appeal to audiences; Jo, the Andy Kaufman acolyte whose ability to make an audience laugh hasn’t yet caught up to her ambition to try something new; even Olivia, the one who just gets it. She isn’t perfect right away, but even in her greenhorn phase, you can see how high she might climb if she sticks with it. There are performers whom audiences just accept; where she goes, they’re willing to follow.
Olivia is one of the book’s most vivid characters. When we meet her, she’s enlisting Artie to drive her to the airport to pick up her twin sister Sally, who announces that she intends to press charges against their stepfather, who molested them both when they were growing up. Olivia is horrified. She doesn’t want to spend any more time thinking about the guy, much less trudge through the details publicly if the case goes to trial.
It’s through Olivia that Bordas teases out one of the book’s central questions: Is the comedian’s mindset healthy or not? Does the constant churn for material, even at life’s darkest moments, provide a resilient mechanism for processing trauma or does it only help us hide from it? Shield us from feeling it fully? Wisely, Bordas doesn’t come down on either side (likely because there is no one answer). Instead, she merely presents scenarios, cycling through interplays between comedy and tragedy like the facets of a diamond under the examiner’s light.
Yet, for Bordas, the stage is the last place for comedians to think through these questions. One of the ways The Material out-does the slew of comedian-centric series that preceded it is in its aversion to “getting real” on stage. A common trope in these kinds of shows is the “truth in comedy” epiphany: a young comedian’s written material does OK, but it’s only when they drop the act and talk about what’s really on their minds that they start doing well. In The Material, by contrast, every time a comedian tries this (Artie, Manny), they fall flat.
This, in my experience, is closer to the truth. Audiences don’t love it de facto when comedians start talking about more serious subjects. In fact, they usually react like the rest of the conference room when Don Draper reveals his tragic upbringing during the Hershey meeting in Mad Men: they pretend it isn’t happening. Many is the time I’ve seen a new comedian use his three minutes at the mic to talk honestly about a breakup or a difficult parent, expecting commendation for his fearlessness and instead getting crickets. You need real chops to handle the big topics, kids. And the breakthroughs only come after long spurts of dedicated practice, not in moments of desperation during a middling set. Bordas understands this, and such insights infuse the novel with a refreshing sense that the author has seen enough comedy to know the score.
The novel is not without its slow points. When Kruger, another of the stand-up instructors, abruptly leaves to visit his father in a nursing home not far from campus, the sequence culminates in the two characters joining one of the father’s friends in the woods to shoot at trees with a contraband pistol. Bordas plays with another feeling familiar to comedians—our guilt around having only soft skills, unable to survive in the wild—but the humor doesn’t quite come together. It tends toward the slapstick in a book that otherwise excels at subtlety and the tumbling, cascading riffs that build and refine as they go. A better moment is Dorothy’s email welcoming Manny to campus, in which she’s completely unable to find the off switch:
Everyone’s ugly here. I’m talking about faculty of course, and I very much include myself in the lot. Some of the students look good though. NOT IN A WAY THAT WOULD MAKE ME WANT TO SLEEP WITH THEM, however, let’s make that very clear. I don’t very much sleep with anyone anymore anyway. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever in my whole life slept with someone younger than me. Isn’t that sad? But yeah, maybe you’ve been in LA long enough that you forgot what real people look like. It will all rush back to you when you come to Chicago.
It's a laugh moment to be sure but also one that relates back to Bordas’s question about how comedy and its practitioners fit into the rest of the world. All Dorothy has to do is dash off a brief hello, but this routine professional task quickly becomes a joke-writing prompt, a chance to let the bits rip. Everything is material; everything is grist for the mill, from sending emails to scrolling through pictures on your phone to feeling lonely as you age to childhood sexual abuse to the unsuspecting customers sitting next to you in the diner. To the extent that this is a useful or healthy mindset, we aren’t sure. All we know is that Bordas’s characters—who are all manner of young, old, famous, obscure—are stuck with it. They’ll be looking at life and asking, “Could this be a bit?” until the day they die. Or quit.