The Material

April 29, 2024
Bordas (How to Behave in a Crowd) sets her clever twist on the campus novel at the country’s first MFA program for stand-up comedy. Unfolding over a single December day at an unnamed university in Chicago, the narrative begins with a faculty department meeting and progresses to a student workshop. Everyone involved in the program is nervously anticipating the arrival of a controversial guest lecturer, recently disgraced comedy legend Manny Reinhardt. Dorothy, the only female faculty member, hopes to make a comeback in her comedy career, while her colleague Kruger dreams of quitting teaching and ascending to movie stardom. Among the students, Artie fears he’s “too good-looking to be funny,” while Jo is constantly on the lookout for Andy Kaufman, who she thinks is still alive. A subplot involving reports of an active shooter on campus feels unnecessary; more successful are Bordas’s explorations of what a stand-up routine requires of its writer and what, if anything, is off-limits, either because the subject is too offensive or because the material belongs to someone else. Occasional moments of broad comedy, like an embarrassing bathroom scene, spice up the observational humor incorporated throughout. It’s a knockout. Agent: Jackie Ko, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
A riffy, funny, whip-smart novel about comedians and their art form. The nearly 10-year-old Stand-Up MFA program is housed--awkwardly, a little resentfully--within the English department of a Chicago university. Bordas' novel begins in a most inhospitable place for comedy, a faculty meeting: worse, a faculty meeting in which people are waxing indignant about the impending hire of a visiting professor, scandal-ridden celebrity comic Manny Reinhardt. The novel spans a single Wednesday, and its point of view moves freely among those in the program: faculty members, students (Olivia, who's reluctant to mine her trauma for laughs; Phil, who's too hesitant to offend; Jo, who's obsessed with Andy Kaufman and believes he's still alive and 40 years into the deep, dark, edgy bit of his "death"; sweet, accommodating Artie, who's hampered by being too handsome), and Reinhardt himself, who's on his way to Chicago a bit early and may get to meet his new students at a late-night competition they're having with an improv troupe. Though there are minor disasters and sources of anxiety aplenty, this is not a book that hinges on plot events or reversals. Instead, Bordas wittily constructs her narrative out of minor encounters, incidents, riffs, meditations. Stand-up, we learn, isn't any of the cliches, a craft or a knack or a calling; for these practitioners, it's less a way of making a living than a way of living. Bit-writing, funny-making, is the lens they use to understand themselves and the world. What makes the book work, first and foremost, is that it's funny--fast and fizzy and dangerous in the way the best stand-up feels improvisatory without ever actually being improv (a discipline for which they feel mostly contempt). But beneath the laughs and digressions lies a surprisingly profound book about the costs and consolations of art. Does doing comedy make these people's lives better? The question is moot, pointless. The last word of that question falls away, has to; the material and the life are the same thing. Can a K�nstlerroman also be a gas? Yes!

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