Comedy book

Fran Magazine: Issue #118

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Holding myself accountable

Back at the end of May, I declared it both “no soda summer” and “no candy summer” — kind of anti brat, in a sense — in an attempt to cut back on my increasingly worrisome sugar intake (thank you, MY DENTIST). I don’t really think I have a problem with soda or with candy, but I do think they’re in the mix way more than they “need” to be. I’m sure my body is already full of microplastics or whatever else I need to be worried about now, but it was more of a, like, can I adapt to having less sugar type of thing. When I worked at an office I was fully addicted to eating candy every 100 minutes and this was sort of what I worried was happening again. Cutting back on sugar while having mono made me the most tired I’ve ever been in my life — awesome. The goal was to try to stick it out through Labor Day, but this past week I had both soda and candy, and I have since declared “no soda summer” and “no candy summer” officially over. Now I can finally have a root beer float and not feel insane about it.

God help me I’ve been forced to acknowledge the world of comedy

kill me

As Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch readers know, I recently read Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon, which I thought I was reading on Veronica’s recommendation, but when I texted Veronica about how much I enjoyed The Bay of Noon, I learned very quickly she’d actually recommended The Evening of the Holiday — a different, short novel about romantic affairs by Hazzard also set in Italy that is also under 200 pages. You can see, maybe, how I would get tripped up.

I am now reading The Evening of the Holiday, from which I wanted to share this passage:

Tordini said: “It’s strange that love letters” — he had forgotten how the subject had come up — “to the Anglo-Saxon mind always take on the character of raving.”

“Unless they are very understated,” Luisa agreed.

“But I suppose,” Tordini went on, “that kind of language is pretty appalling, if you take it seriously.”

“Anything’s appalling,” said Luisa, “if you take it seriously.”

I was struck by the conversation in the otherwise svelte Hazzard novel because it reminded me, briefly, of the novel I’d just finished read the day before: The Material by Camille Bordas.

The book was first recommended by Morgan and then a few other friends mentioned it to me. Nicholas reached out and asked what I knew and then was kind enough to send over a copy. As I’ve written before, I do a very bad job keeping up with contemporary fiction unless it’s a book by someone I know (yay) or an author whose work I already follow (Rooney, sure, or French, or Hjorth, or whatever). In order for me to pick up a newish release, I need at least two friends who don’t know each other to recommend it, and even then I just put it on hold from the library where I inevitably learn that I’m the 249th person in line for the book and we’ll see if I even still want it by the time it shows up.

I imagine that the book was recommended to me because Bordas’ novel is set in a singular day in the lives of both students and faculty alike at an MFA program (car alarm goes off) in stand-up comedy (six more car alarms go off) in Chicago (whole block’s worth of car alarms go off). I don’t like when people grade anything artistic on the realism meter, for which I would have ample life experience, and I am therefore otherwise not concerned with how realistic such a thing would be or play out in the confines of this particular blog.¹ Bordas’ book is far more of a character student of the people involved in the program than it is an indictment or statement on the “state” of comedy or the “usefulness” of comedy — though obviously those come through — and in lieu of grading her on an accuracy scale², I was curious about two craft elements of her book both of which have contend with the work’s relationship to time.

1. The Material is set over the course of a single day.

2. Bordas wanted the book to not be “too topical” or timely.

In an interview with the Chicago Review of Books, she said:

I’m not really a fan of “topical” books, so my fear when I was writing this was that it would have a timestamp on it, and that the issues of today would date it. It’s a universal thing, to want to do your part and to fit in. Everyone tends to think it was better X many years ago with regard to being able to make jokes, but it really wasn’t. In that sense, nostalgia isn’t very useful. 

When I was reading the novel, I was curious about how reference light the text was. We get a number of mentions of Andy Kaufman, who one of the students is particularly obsessed with, and of Bill Burr, who it seems Bordas personally really loves. There is also one bizarre passing aside about the short-lived HBO show Togetherness starring at least one Duplass brother (Mark?) and perhaps created by both of them. So we know in this version of the world that we have 1) alternate comedians (Kaufman), 2) mainstream comedians (Burr), and 3) the mumblecore movement (Duplass brothers).³

To that extent, it reminded me of how Emily Henry’s Beach Read namedropped Taylor Swift constantly but not any particular era (sorry) or album of Swift’s. Sitting down and listening to Reputation and sitting down and listening to evermore are fundamentally different experiences. Consider the Hazzard: maybe I am thinking about this too seriously. Would any passive or non-fan of Swift’s really be able to tell Reputation and evermore apart or would it all just sound like “adult kids bop” as people on Twitter like to label her music?⁴

Because the novel is set over the course of the day, Bordas can get away with eliding some backstory — why any of these students are here, for instance, and how they’ve related to each other in the months leading up to this. The two “main” students are Artie — who is too handsome to be actually funny and also just not funny⁵ — and Olivia — who is mean (?) and cloying, eager to please professors and otherwise snap at her classmates. The faculty characters are a little more fleshed out: the embittered middle-aged guy who “industry famous,” the femcel Gen X storyteller, the cancelled middle-aged stand-up who just so happens to be the femcel Gen Xers ex-boyfriend. There is a brief diversion mid-book with a fake active shooter alert going off on campus — funny, kind of — but otherwise the novel moves from class (students bombing) to show at the Empty Bottle “against” Second City improv students (students bombing again).

Bordas says in multiple interviews she wanted to skew the usual take on the campus novel by presenting an artform that’s hard to be workshopped — that comedy is judged not necessarily on “goodness” (moral or otherwise) but how funny it is. If something bombs, it bombs. You have to come up with a new idea (“The Material”), and thus much of the book is these characters moving through the world wondering if things that are currently happening to them or once happened to them would make for good comedy.

For all that Bordas seems concerned about not rooting her novel in any particular scene or moment in comedy, I find it very difficult to consider comedy out of context — of time, place, politics, whatever. It’d be one thing to do a context-free type of novel where everyone is concerned with, like, vaudeville-style pratfalls, but this is a book where most characters work in a standard, mainstream combination observational-storytelling mode of stand-up comedy. We get… not extended flashbacks, per se… but little windows through the novels third-person floating narration into things that have happened to these characters: Artie’s brother is addicted to heroin, one of the professor’s fathers has Parkinson’s, there’s a #MeToo subplot⁶ paired with a parent of a once-disabled child subplot, and we learn at the eleventh hour that Olivia, the book’s weakest character, was sexually assaulted as a child.

These details exist both to propel the justification of why these people are in comedy to begin with (they’re fucked up) but more importantly feel like the most topical thing that novel has to contend with, which is to say — the pressure to psychoanalyze and over-traumatize its creative characters to give them something to talk or contextualize their work within. It feels like a hyper-modern and topical convention of the novel (and most other artforms), which is to say, if you sat around with a circle of people at any given time, you might come to learn they’ve all been through something horrible. Okay — well, then who cares? How does that affect form or content of their fictional work? I agree with her that nostalgia is not fundamentally useful, and I don’t think that writing something like, “Forty years ago we wouldn’t know any of this shit about these people!” but by the back half of the book, it seems all that we’ve read is far more informed by what we’ve learned in summary than actual action on the page, of which there’s frankly little

Bordas’ answer to this point seems to be that this information exists in her work because all of these characters have thought about putting this type of autobiographical information into their comedy, but few are brave or smart enough to figure out how to do it, returning to a very tired conversation around what can and cannot be joked about. The resulting and final(ish) scene of the novel suggests that doing so — this kind of contemporary excavation of self — is not really funny, or interesting, outside of the lurid curiosity it briefly fuels.

So what is funny — to her? To me? The book has two bits (one of which is story-based, the other is kind of a one-off) revolving around a form of humiliation, both of which I think work better than just about anything else going for it. The first is that in the midst of the active shooter aside, the Gen X professor gets trapped in a conference room with one of the English faculty members who she finds corny and annoying, but their panicked sentimental time together ignites a long dormant horniness in her even though she doesn’t respect him. She works up the whole second half of the novel to send him a text about hanging out outside of work only to be immediately rebuked — FUNNY. The second bit is just that Artie (hot student) accidentally pays for more expensive parking than he intends to when volunteering to drive Olivia (his crush) to the airport, and doesn’t know how to mention that he paid for expensive parking without seeming like he wants some money from her but he also would accept money from her — FUNNY. (She winds up not paying him anything, I think — also funny.) What this suggests, to me at least, is that the things that make us laugh in life are similar to that in comedy, which is to say: someone putting themselves out there in a way that demands to be liked. The stakes are (maybe surprisingly) higher off-stage than on when the failures of embarrassment can be hidden, secluded, and buried rather than mined for a few laughs.

1. It’s not just that I went to a fiction MFA program and that I used to do comedy and that I lived in Chicago — it’s worth noting that, well, 1) the idea of doing comedy in a form of university-based academia does already exist at both Columbia College in Chicago and at Emerson. I believe NYU has some kind of comedy writing certificate as well. I was in Chicago doing comedy when the Columbia College program got its funding to be a four-year thing rather than just a semester-only intensive (the latter of which I did my senior fall in college), and the attitude among most people I knew was that this was a bad idea. A long thread on Reddit where someone asks if they should major in comedy ( :( ) ends in a Columbia College alum mentioning they have $110,000 in student loans so they could do a four-year comedy program. Anyway, I’m assuming Bordas’ fictional stand-up MFA program is funded.

2. “Why was Lady Raven performing a concert during the day” — SHUT THE FUCK UP

3. I can’t tell if Bordas is making fun of the Duplass brothers or not in the context of the book. Either way, I think their inclusion in the text’s “non-canonical” canon… very funny.

4. I genuinely think a non-listener could tell that these are vastly different styles — not unlike putting on, say, Renaissance and then Cowboy Carter. But I could be wrong!

5. A pretty solid observation — in any given comedy class, stand-up or otherwise, there’s usually a solid 30% of students who are too good-looking to have any kind of comedic point of view and are just there for attention. Of course, many of these students go on to great success!

6. The book’s cancelled comedian is in trouble, specifically, for assaulting another male comic at a club (punching him in the face, not sexual assault) and “proposing marriage to one-night stands” while wasted. It’s hard to tell with a detail like this whether or not Bordas is sending up cancel culture (“can you believe someone would get in trouble over this?”) or not really wanting to engage with it in general by having the offenses be, well, kind of inoffensive and otherwise bizarre. In a book that doesn’t really mention any cases of cancelled comedians, of which there have been a decent few across the spectrum over the years, it’s hard to contextualize — damn, there it is again — how severe we’re meant to take these actions.