THE MATERIAL, by Camille Bordas
Everyone’s a critic — and now, it seems, a comedian too. Actual one-liners are what flourish on the platform now known with titanium self-seriousness as X. “Content creators,” a terrible umbrella term that covers some very funny and talented people, are arguably your new late-night hosts, yukking it up over there on TikTok.
Camille Bordas’s “The Material” examines this changing state of professional humor, and manages to be an amusing variation on the campus novel, too.
Only a few fleeting references — to the philosopher Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter, the poet Charles Baudelaire and the highly stylized 1961 film “Last Year at Marienbad” — hint that the author’s first language was French. There is no tentativeness about the English language, but rather a heightened sensitivity. When and how, one character muses, did Apple decide to hijack the psyche (“You have a new memory”) and pelt us with old selfies? “More of that imprecision, he thought, more of that turning words into more or less than they actually were — manicures into ‘self-care,’ meat into ‘protein.’ A photo wasn’t a memory. A photo was a photo.”
Applause for that.
“The Material” is set mostly in Chicago, seat of the famed Second City talent farm, a Goliath that has been criticized for racism. A David has emerged: a Stand Up M.F.A. program, the “first of its kind” under the wing of an unnamed university’s clucking English department. Administrators have invited a veteran comic named Manny Reinhardt, successful and recognizable enough to have had his own HBO special, to be a visiting professor. Undergraduates find this problematic because he once broke the nose of a younger comic who called him a “dinosaur” and has proposed marriage to one-night stands now accusing him of “emotional misconduct.”
In a Richard Russo or David Lodge book, Reinhardt — who’s trying to figure out if he can finally mine his lawyer son’s serious childhood illness for the stage — would probably be the headliner. But Bordas is effectively emceeing an open-mic night — one that takes place, like “Mrs. Dalloway” et al., over the course of one day. Technology has transformed our concept of time, and that means something for comedy, which relies on timing.
In our present-day screenopolis of constant entertainment and commerce, the performers in “The Material” agonize over the integrity of comedy as live art form. What, they are all wondering in various ways, is OK to use, and by whom? Addiction? The Holocaust? Child molestation? Gender and race? Also, is it possible Andy Kaufman faked his own death for the most committed bit in history, and if so, was that ethical?
You get the feeling that Bordas, an assistant professor herself at the University of Florida and widely published writer of short stories, wants to put wokeness if not to bed, then down for a nice nap. The same character who deplores spoon-fed Apple Memories wants a word “for what ‘rape’ used to mean.” Ashbee, the sole Black professor in the program, admits that he enjoys being the token hire, and theorizes wearily that “soon, comedians would only be able to joke about other species if they wanted to stay clear of scandal. After that, it would only be a question of time before people started getting offended on behalf of the animals in question, but still, there was a window there for now.”
Manny rolls his eyes at a tweet suggesting that Americans stop using “‘Northern Hemisphere-specific seasonal language,’ because people had to be aware that what was summer for them wasn’t summer for everybody else on the planet.” The person proposes instead a transparently capitalistic-specific system of referring to quarters (Q1, Q2, etc.), and is immediately mocked for being “heliocentric.”
In a world of mass shootings, when the old prop pistol with the “bang” handkerchief has understandably fallen out of fashion, “The Material” even considers whether guns can be funny. In a weird sub-sub-plot, one professor’s father, who has Parkinson’s, shoots a bar customer through the hand with a family heirloom rifle. More centrally, a 40-something female professor named Dorothy Michaels — do I spy a “Tootsie” reference? — gets trapped with the English department head during a possible active-shooter situation, flashing on the scene in the Coen brothers movie “Burn After Reading” where George Clooney shoots a grinning Brad Pitt.
The police and TV crews have barely arrived before two students are trying out jokes. “We need gun violence,” one says. “Just like we need unaffordable health care. It’s what makes us who we are.”
Despite this dramatic-sounding setup, there are next to no major events in this novel, which builds toward a laugh-off battle with members of Second City at a club called the Empty Bottle, where drinks are nursed and Adderall causes a minor medical emergency. It’s a stream of neurotic consciousness flowing from person to person, an extended “take my smartphone — please” routine, and an impressive piece of Q3 reading.
THE MATERIAL | By Camille Bordas | Random House | 288 pp. | $28
