THE MATERIAL

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 Künstlerroman also be a gas? Yes!