There are a lot of reasons why something is funny. It’s hard for everyone to agree on those reasons. And it’s virtually impossible to agree on whether something is actually funny or not in the first place. But one thing is incontrovertible: the more you unpick, analyse and dissect comedy, the less funny it becomes. So what is left behind after that?
Into this tricky arena – cue tapping on microphone and feedback noise – steps this experimental and sometimes infuriating novel. The Material is, to its credit, fluid, inventive and often, yes, funny. But it’s also confusing and challenging in ways that don’t always feel intentional. It describes a day in the world of the University of Chicago’s (fictional) Stand-Up MFA programme, a graduate course being taken by students like Artie (‘too handsome to be funny’) and Olivia (neurotic-in-denial).
The well-intentioned young people are good company and often amusing. But they don’t seem to do what most would-be stand-ups their age would do if they were truly intending to become professional comedians (i.e. spend most of their time at open mic nights). Instead they treat their timetabled academic workshops as if they were gigs, sweating over every utterance in class. Are we supposed to laugh at how delusional this is? Or empathise with their calculatedly earnest attempts to elicit laughs in a completely pointless hypothetical setting? I wasn’t sure.
It’s unclear overall whether the entire set-up is metaphorical. The faculty is run by professional comedians. This is where it gets too meta. Or maybe just too American? The head of the faculty is fresh from the chat- show circuit, talking about his latest movie with Meryl Streep. This kind of detail shows, of course, why such a comedy course does not exist outside fiction. Real-life comedians who had ‘just been on Conan’ would never take up a teaching position on a course like this for reasons related to both money and celebrity. As the day reaches its climax, the students are about to receive a visit from a new teacher: a recently ‘cancelled’ comedian who is so famous that he can’t leave his house because of the paparazzi… but who can seemingly attend a graduate improv show.
This is the fourth novel from Camille Bordas, her second in English. (The first two were in her native French.) Her writing has been praised by everyone from Rachel Cusk to George Saunders. There’s definitely a quirky wryness here that will please fans of Curtis Sittenfeld and A.M. Homes. But in the end you have to wonder if the joke is not on comedy itself but on the real-life equivalent of exactly this kind of academic set-up: creative writing courses. When we can’t explain why something was funny, we say: You had to be there. This is the fictional embodiment of that kind of mic drop.
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