The Material

A Novel

By: Camille Bordas

Narrated by: Megan Tusing

Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

A single momentous day transforms the lives of students and professors at a school for stand-up comedy in a novel that “[brims] with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs” (The Wall Street Journal)

“Insightful, compassionate, biting and honest.”—The Washington Post

“Brilliance is on display here.”—Percival Everett, author of James and The Trees

Longlisted for the New American Voices Award

Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up MFA 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 punch line will either get you to a punch line 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.

©2024 Camille Bordas (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Bordas seamlessly weaves together the neuroses, insecurities, and egos of her characters, yielding a novel that both skewers the comic impulse to turn everything into ‘material,’ and manages to live up to the humor of its subject.”—Bustle

“With an emotional pendulum that can swing between pathos and bathos, [The Material] a high-wire act and masterclass in tone, observation and the beneath-the-surface substance.”—Style Weekly

“Brimming with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs. . . Bordas makes a case that [emotion and comedy can] coexist.”—The Wall Street Journal

Ran87507

I was really hoping to like it, but it went nowhere. It became a little boring for me