The Material

by Camille Bordas

A single momentous day transforms the lives of students and professors at a school for stand-up comedy in a novel that explores the humor and tragedy of everyday existence, from "an invaluable new voice" (George Saunders)

Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade.

Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there's a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punchline will either get you to a punchline or force you to be one.

They’re all afraid to be one.

Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students’ respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent.

Whether a visiting professor—the high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian, Manny Reinhardt—will do more to help or harm their cause remains to be seen. But he’s on his way. He’ll be arriving sooner than anyone thinks.

Riffing keenly across a diverse array of precision-cut perspectives, The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh, and the longing to make others laugh even harder.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Humor, Literary Fiction, Novels, Adult Fiction, Comedy

10 pages, Audiobook

First published June 11, 2024

About the author

Camille Bordas est née à Lyon, en 1987. Elle a passé son enfance au Mexique et vit maintenant à Paris. Elle est étudiante en anthropologie.
En 2009, elle a été remarquée par la critique avec la parution de son premier roman, Les treize desserts, pour lequel elle a reçu la Bourse Thyde Monnier de la SGDL et le Prix du Livre du département du Rhône.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

i like books and i like comedy. surely, i thought, i'd like a combination of the two.

but the title of this book is apt. this isn’t the good stuff, nor is it the bad stuff. it’s just literally everything. it doesn’t make a judgment call on what is or isn’t interesting or worth including — it just throws all of it in there for you to decide.
 
that means paragraphs of internal monologue followed by “he didn’t actually think that.” that means an omniscient narrator and a thousand characters with interiority. that means unbelievably stale-feeling (as in stale to the point that it seems more likely that an alien wrote these based on studying the world from 2013 to 2018 than an author would find them worthy of transcription last year) observations about life, comedy, love, happiness, political correctness. 

in spite of the fact that all of that significantly outweighed the moments that this was evocative or funny or even notable, i didn't hate this book.

i mean, not quite.

bottom line: net neutral.

(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)

[Lee Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Secondary meanings of the title suggest the essential substance, the whole cloth from which the final product/performance takes form, the humanity that yields the humor. Third-person POV moving through a handful of teachers and students' lives, minds, and histories, way more interior and questioning than expected, scenes opened with amusing musings, observations (eg, how watching TV in English with English subtitles on sort of feels like watching with another person), and insightful conclusions. Set in Chicago but more so seems to exist in an idealized space for lecture and discussion, the pages like classroom and stage.

Also very much recommend the author's semi-recent story in The New Yorker, Colorin Colorado, which I've never read but have listened to twice.

[Sunny Lu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truly more sad than funny, which is kind of the point I guess, but also— we kind of already know that comedians and famous people are probably the most joyless people in the world. I don’t think this book really pushes that around or plays with it beyond these irritating characters’ vain musings.

[John Caleb Grenn]

A smart novel but unfortunately felt like it was explaining a punch line the entire time. Not my jam.

[Ashley]

DNF at 20%

This couldn't hold my interest; I kept finding myself completely zoning out, out of boredom. I'm (maybe unhealthily) obsessed w the comedy scene, and I think this may just be too far before the rise of the comedians I love.

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ebook. A delightful novel that takes us inside a Chicago University that offers an MFA in stand up comedy. We spend a long day with both the faculty and students as they decide if a controversial comedian should join the staff, teach classes, go through an active shooter hoax, pick up an identical twin at the airport, worry about a missing brother with a drug history and end the night in a local bar battling it out on stage versus the improv group from Second City. A very fun and thoughtful novel.

[Elena Longo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Partiamo col dire che non è un libro brutto, ma ha destato davvero poco il mio interesse. In Materiale sensibile la trama è quasi accessoria (ci sono pochissimi avvenimenti); il fulcro, teoricamente, dovrebbero essere i personaggi e le loro riflessioni. Badate bene: io molto spesso apprezzo i libri “no plot, just vibes”, quindi di base non avrei avuto problemi. Quello che non ha funzionato è che di questi personaggi mi è importato meno di zero.
I pensieri messi in campo sono palesemente quelli dell’autrice, o comunque quelli che la Broca riteneva più adatti ai propri scopi, e vengono messi in bocca ai personaggi in modo assolutamente forzato e poco credibile. Materiale sensibile è composto da pagine e pagine di sproloqui artificiosi. Inoltre è difficile seguire il tutto perché si passa da un personaggio all’altro in maniera del tutto random.
Non è un libro multipov canonico: lo switch tra i punti di vista avviene anche nel giro di poche righe, come in un match di ping pong, non permettendo al lettore di seguire in maniera adeguata. La ciliegina sulla torta è che, in un libro che parla di comici, non dico che bisogna per forza sganasciarsi dal ridere, ma mi aspetto almeno una vena comica o delle considerazioni argute; invece qui ci sono solo spiegoni fini a se stessi.
Sono contenta di non averlo mollato solo perché le ultime 60–70 pagine sono quelle che salvano il romanzo: sono un pochino più armoniche e permettono almeno di provare un briciolo di empatia per i personaggi.

[cass krug · Rating 4 out of 5]

thank you to random house for sending me an arc, and happy pub day to the material!

this was one of those books that i simply looked forward to picking up every time i had a chance to read. i feel like this is as close to a romp as i’ll get - even though it deals with some heavy topics, it does so with the right balance of humor and levity. everyone in the cast of characters is dealing with their own personal issues - fraught family relationships, depression, loneliness - gathering anecdotes to use as material for their routines in the stand-up comedy MFA. this book asks questions about how we deal with the things that happen to us, who has the right to turn certain stories into jokes, and is such a fun yet touching look into the way we connect with others who we’re in forced proximity with. i also thought that the use of images within the book was helpful for some of the niche references that bordas makes, and is something i wish more novels did.

while i loved getting insight into the entire cast of characters, there were a few that i wish we had gotten a bit more backstory about. i also wanted a bit (see what i did there) more resolution from the ending, but since the story takes place over the course of a single day, i can see why we didn’t get neat, tied-up ends.

great writing and storytelling + dark humor = a shining example of how to add comedic elements to literary fiction!

[claire]

a book for traumatized freaks & self-appointed court jesters

many many thanks to penguin random house for putting this on my radar with the arc and then sending me a finished copy as well!! <3

the material hits on a lot of points that i love in lit fic. we have a large, well-rounded cast of characters. we have a campus setting. we have really good pop culture references. and to my absolute delight, we have characters working through trauma in ways that are not productive or good for them!! LOL

the material follows a group of students and teachers in a comedy mfa program in chicago over the course of one day. each character is dealing with their own insecurities and anxieties while performing the version of themselves they want everyone else to see. finding humor in often dark and unexpected places, the material asks its characters (and the reader) how much they are willing to reveal of themselves to be liked, to be respected, and, most importantly, to be funny.

despite taking place only in one day, i grew so attached to these characters. bordas really manages to flesh out their backstories and make them feel like real people, not just vehicles for various bits. that being said, there were also so many funny moments here, and just as many heart-wrenching ones. bordas really asks the reader to lean in and laugh at the uncomfortable moments, which is right up my alley.

i've already called out the traumatized freaks and self-appointed court jesters (i can say that, this is a self-report lol), but this book is also for anyone who says "commit to the bit" and means it, people who watched the movie man on the moon as a child and have been dealing with the consequences ever since, and those who own the soundtrack to bo burnham's inside on vinyl. (literally all of these apply to me because i am the target demographic for this book lmao)

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't my cup of tea. I ended up skimming through the last half because I got tired of the characters and the "bits." On the one hand, the author did a good job of capturing (I imagine) what goes into being a stand-up - constantly looking for "material." One the other hand, it makes them look like loud people to spend time with.

[Sammie · Rating 3 out of 5]

As it says on the cover “wryly funny and painfully awkward.” I would say 100% nailed it. I had some uncomfy moments of like - what am I even reading this for?? To moments of soft chuckles, and moments of laugh out louds. Kinda glad I read it after the fact. Unsure if I would recommend it, it’s gotta go to a dry humor person for sure.

[Veronica · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. La vita è troppo breve per leggere l’ennesima Sally Rooney.

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting premise, great variety of characters, riveting story and incredible visuals in the writing. I only wish it were at least double in length - the ending felt abrupt and out of the blue.

[Alfie Davies-Farrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you." — Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Daniels

I've been an on-and-off subscriber to the New Yorker since 2017. Sometime between January of that year and the summer of 2018, I read one of Camille Bordas' stories — either Most Die Young or The State of Nature. Whichever it was, I bought her novel How to Behave in a Crowd and read it at an ex's house that summer. I've been recommending it ever since. Seven years later, in August 2023, I emailed Bordas asking when her next novel was going to be released. She replied the same day. I read the Material in a week.

The Material takes place over the course of a single day, following a pretty broad cast of characters at a master's course in stand-up comedy. Writing characters who self-identify as comedians is an utterly enormous gamble, as it necessitates the author show the reader their hand. Suddenly we aren't wondering if the characters are funny, but if the author is funny enough to make them funny. Thankfully, as mentioned, I've read Bordas' stories — her funniness is the reason I kept reading them.

This is one of those incredibly rare books that I didn't want to end. One of those books that I found myself wishing I could make some sort of pact to extend; the characters are so deftly composed both intellectually and emotionally, so elegantly balanced against one-another that I could have stayed with them for a syndicated nine-series sitcom. They are conceited, caring, bumbling, self-centred, funny — in a word, they are human.

However, Bordas gets around the need to have them be funny all the time by situating them all in varying states of becoming. Looking at the students specifically, they don't have to be hilarious — in fact, they aren't really meant to be. Bordas tells us they aren't in the opening two pages, as big-name comedian Kruger -new to teaching-, wonders whether his colleagues Dorothy and Ashbee (veteran comics themselves) even know how to judge the quality of the applicants' self-tapes. We meet the students at what seems to be the nadir of their comedic journeys, where they have more or less lost faith in their stand-up abilities.

The teachers, too, are in stages of transgression. Dorothy is going back on tour, Kruger is starting an acting career, Manny is being cancelled. Just as the students have begun to doubt themselves as to whether they have what it takes, the teachers are in varying states of wondering whether they can still do what they do, and why they even do it at all — faced with ageing and the ever-accelerating samsara of [internet] culture, the grown-ups of the novel seem to be filled with just as much self-doubt and self-pity as the characters in their mid-20s. "He did all this so THESE guys would laugh?" Manny wonders, of the audience whom he so desperately craves and yet so virulently despises. "What was the point of all this? ... Wasn't it to make time disappear?"

Very little of Bordas' work in this novel is concerned with description. And very little is concerned with exposition. In fact, very little is concerned with an overt story. And yet I was racing through each page, sprinting through prose that is expressed largely in internal monologue as Bordas focusses on one of her cast at a time. In turn they are sent from the happenstance of their day into internal monologue, where we learn about them through how they process whatever it is that's going on in front of them. This amounts to a general sense of detachment — what is identified as the comedian's unending task of gathering material ultimately contributes to a dissociation from their moment-to-moment lives: why live in the moment when you can live in your mind? Why process what's in front of you when, in real-time, you can imagine turning it all into a bit?

When Kruger, visiting his father at a nursing home, is reflecting on the fact that he has just bought the angry, doddery old man a gun, his method of internally reckoning with the situation is to wonder which elements of the story he would leave in when re-telling it all as a routine. "He also knew that the shooting lesson would become a bit. He knew it in his heart. It had made him too sad not to rewrite and try laughing about it." How would he tweak the story for stand-up? What would he ham-up for laughs? This coping mechanism even bleeds out into Kruger's decision making: when his father asks him whether he would like to stay for soup, Kruger wonders to himself: "would he stick around for soup? Would soup be a part of the bit?"

That comedians are perhaps the saddest of entertainers is an irony well-known and well-explored. Everybody has seen those Facebook memes, the ones of Robin Williams smiling that say something to the tune of 'the ones who laugh the hardest cry the most'. And yet Bordas firmly avoids an overt sense of tragedy in this book. Time and time again the characters find themselves in a sudden moment of possible upheaval, wherein the proverbial anvil appears to teeter over their head. Will Mickey turn up dead? Who will be killed by the school shooter? Will Sword cheat on his wife with Dorothy? Surely Artie will be furious with Olivia over the stolen bit. If not him, then August at Manny for telling his embarrassing origin story? Won't Manny even be torn up after bombing at the Empty Bottle? No. No, no, no. At each possible juncture, crises are avoided — everything pretty much works out fine. Time and time again in this novel Bordas sets the stage for melodrama and each time, just you start to bite your nails, just when you think you can see how this book is going to gut-punch you with catastrophe... your expectations are subverted. Everybody's fine. August isn't offended. Life continues as normal.

I realised when I finished The Material how I could best sum it up, with regards to what I just talked about in that paragraph above. The day of The Material is ostensibly mundane. When looking at it as both a series of isolated incidents, and as a gestalt, there isn't a lot to be obviously excited about. And yet, if I put myself in the shoes of any of the characters who I mentioned in the paragraph above, I can see why it's so special. Should catastrophe have happened, should, say Artie find out that Mickey had died of a heroin overdose, wouldn't he have given anything to have had a day like he's had in The Material? Wouldn't he have given anything to have had a sleepy conversation about Galileo with his brother over the phone? We all want our lives to be in some way exciting; we all in some way wish, waking up up on a Tuesday, that something unexpected would happen to us, something life-changing, but rarely do we stop and appreciate the days that feature nothing of the sort. I think that's why Artie gets so hooked on the cobbler — there is a beauty in the mundanity of this day: as if, for many of the characters, this book takes place in the universe where everything winded up okay. Where that awful thing didn't happen. The one, in the wake of tragedy, that we drive ourselves crazy thinking about how we would trade anything to be in instead. See Esther's name pop up on his phone, Artie "felt propelled down to a secret hole in the ground... his stomach and brain drop[ped] many feet below to a secret underground that had been there all along, a secret underground in which Mickey was dead." Had Mickey been dead, and Artie had stayed down in that hole, then The Material is what he would have tried in vain to claw his way back up to.

This is a novel with pathos and poignance in equal measure — it made me laugh and it made me cry. Bordas' prose is so much fun to read, and her characters such a joy to watch interact with one-another; they wonder the things that I wonder, they say the stupid shit that we all say sometimes, and they worry about themselves and others in ways that everybody on earth worries about everyone. It's hilarious, it's self-pitying, it's encouraging, it's melancholic (the happiness of being sad — Victor Hugo), it's irreverent, it's sardonic. It's a book by an author whom I will be reading for the rest of my life. Basically, it's just really, really fucking good.

[alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narcissistic depressed college student litfic but it’s written by a French stand-up comedy fan, so it’s about cancel culture and identity politics in comedy and every character is actively mining small talk for joke material while also consciously rewriting the events in their own life to fabricate a punchline/meaningful takeaway for a future audience.

I could have loved or hated this book if it was maybe two degrees different, but I mostly got a kick out of it as someone who lives in Chicago and cares about improv. Characters calling them “improvisation classes” felt a little like when game designer David Cage sticks merry-go-rounds in a public american playground. If you’re a comedy nerd with strong opinions on Aaron Sorkin’s freakishly patriotic fake SNL show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, you WILL have thoughts.

My thoughts? I personally didn’t find it funny, but miserably hashing out everyone’s tight five eventually starts to wrap around to anti-comedy. I also liked how often characters were like “ugh….she’s trying to riff with me I am NOT in the mood to riff right now :/“ any time they had a remotely light-hearted back and forth. The insert photos felt CRAZY.

[Kim Fabbri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Se una scrittrice riesce a farmi pensare "beh, meglio Sally Rooney" è bene che stia molto alla larga da me.

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ho iniziato a leggere il libro perché fa parte del bookclub di Heloola ma onestamente avrei voluto saltarlo. Ho comunque tentato ma ho fatto veramente una gran fatica a leggerlo. Ho trovato faticoso immergersi nella storia e collocarsi in uno spazio temporale e fisico, a ricordare i personaggi e a seguire le vicende e i racconti. Avrei tanto voluto che mi piacesse ma non so, è stata una gran fatica. È l’unica cosa che riesco a dire. Ascolterò il materiale extra ma il libro non mi ha proprio convinta purtroppo.

[Ava Kaplan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little anecdote about Ms. Camille Bordas:

I first picked up a copy of her book ‘How To Behave In A Crowd’ when I was at a bookstore in Los Angeles in 2019. I had never heard of her or the book but it called to me. I ended up reading it during Covid and really loving it (highly recommend). I looked her up after finishing it and saw that she was a creative writing professor at UF!! so I sent an email to her school email through my school email telling her how much I loved her book. She replied that when the pandemic was over, we should get coffee in Gainesville. That never ended up happening LOL but I feel very loyal towards her and connected to her, especially because she is French. Anyway this is her new book!!

My review:

Loved the uniqueness of the structure of the ever-changing POVS. Loved the cast of characters and how we became so intimate with them and how we could see character development and changes in their relationships dynamic in the span of literally one day. Loved the subject being comedians as someone who has done some comedy in my life and spend a lot of time around comedians. It felt really authentic. The theme of Using Life For Material felt really relevant because although it’s something comedians do for their jobs it’s something we all do more and more as we mine our lives for Content on social media. I know I’m guilty of it!

The whole book felt like the pilot episode of a sitcom in that it was setting so much up, we were getting to know the setting, the dynamics, etc and then it just ends right when things are starting to pick up. Kind of unsatisfying in that way but I see what Bordas was trying to do. Overall really enjoyed !

3/5

[alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
the tortured poets department? no. the tortured stand-up comedians department. and goddamn are these people tortured

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been watching Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Jerry Seinfeld as he drives and has coffee and talks and laughs with various standup comics (highly recommended as a way to laugh at the end of the day). And in one episode the question of whether stand-up comedy can be taught came up and the answer from these comedians is NO, you can't teach it, and one of the comics, Steve Harvey, I think, had been asked to lecture to a stand-up class, and he told those students the fact that you're here means you won't make it. It turned out to be absolutely coincidental that my nightly watching of Seinfeld and others has dovetailed with reading The Material - a campus novel of sorts set in an unnamed university in Chicago, and focused on the students and professors in the MFA program in Stand-Up Comedy. It's a revolving cast of characters, six students, four professors, a controversial and famous comedian hired as a guest lecturer, and we're in all of their heads, moving in and out of their thoughts, as they mine themselves and their lives, their every thought and interaction and everything else for anything that might provide them with material, with bits that might eventually be written and honed and be funny. It takes place over 18 hours, beginning with a department meeting and ending with the annual battle between MFA student-comedians and an improve troupe of Second City. In between, there is so much - from Holocaust holograms of survivors, to crushes, to father-son and mother-son relationships, the sibling relationship between twins, sexual abuse, loneliness, divorce, a campus shooter, and more. At the core: the costs and failures, the consolations that are so rare, in trying to make this particular kind of art, but really any art. As Seinfeld and his cohorts often say during the series I've been watching - for comedians nothing is off the table, despite the always-changing boundaries of what is acceptable and not, and while that is mirrored here, to a degree, these students are also coming up against the limits, what is now considered politically correct, etc. It's a dense book in that we're moving among so many characters, and yet comes alive and I remained consistently interested to know how they would respond to whatever they might be facing.

[Melody · Rating 4 out of 5]

When done well, I love being inside the head of a neurotic, overthinking narrator, and Camille Bordas has provided me with an embarrassment of riches in The Material. The story unfolds over the course of one day as students and teachers in the Chicago Stand-Up Comedy MFA program prepare for the annual end-of-year battle against the Second City improv troupe, which is taking place that evening.

We're in the characters' heads - the stream-of-consciousness POV seamlessly rotates within chapters from one character to another - as they go about their day, navigating awkward colleague relationships, rivalries, crushes, the impending arrival of a "cancelled" guest lecturer, and, all the while, mining everything for potential comedy. For a book about stand-up comedy, it's rarely laugh-out-loud funny - and there's a lot of sadness, trauma, and regret being examined here - but there's often a low-grade current of dark humor running through our protagonists' thoughts, which are sometimes cringe-y, but - at least for me - extremely relatable. The characters are self-absorbed, but mostly trying to do their best - often while acting on incomplete information. The rotating POV allows us to be with one character who's wondering if they just offended their classmate, and then immediately inside the head of said classmate, who actually hadn't been listening.

Bordas balances compassion, dark humor, and cynicism here in a way that really works for me. I liked this one a lot!

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could either say something stupid like "maybe French people are alright after all" or I could bare my heart about how Camille changed the trajectory of my writing forever. Instead I'll just say that this was a good book, as expected.

[Yan Castaldo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing happens and this would be fine if there was something more to all the nothing that happens but there kinda isn’t. Anyway she’s a good writer at least

[Francesca (sognastorie) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Questo libro non l’ho proprio capito

[Rick Goff · Rating 2 out of 5]

According to the jacket, some good novelists admire this book. So maybe I just don’t get it.

[Anna Winer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really tedious. While I wouldn't necessarily expect a book about stand up comedians to be a laugh a minute, I would expect at least some humor to shine through. There is none in this book, and I don't think it's because the author wasn't sometimes trying for it. Maybe stand up is all in the delivery, but reading the "bits" that we see the characters perform is in every case painful, and their "riffing" with one another always sounds flat. That would be ok if the characters were interesting, but despite their different life situations, their interior musings all sound pretty much the same. It's the type of book I was skimming at the end, just to get it over with so I could move on to something else.

[John Chomiak · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the worst thing I’ve read in five years. I’m considering quitting my book club for having to read it.

Remember season 1 of And Just Like That when Carrie is third mic on woke Cumtown? If you thought that arc was funny, this book is for you.

Everyone in this book sucked, every observation sucked.

Seeing reviews calling this a sad book. ??? Are people that moved by basic trauma plots? A woman is molested. A brother does heroin. Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad

Bad! Ugh. Bleh. I want to burn this book. Or ban it. Idk. Read a Possibility of an Island if you want to read something interesting about comedy.

[Emily Herron · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book's concept was interesting, but I didn't connect to any of the characters or the events. Everything felt very low stakes, and the CONSTANT and fluid POV shifts were confusing. There were so many characters that there wasn't enough time or content to connect to any of them.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Ellis D · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5