The Material

A Novel

By: Camille Bordas

Narrated by: Megan Tusing

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

ONE OF SLATE’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • 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.

Ran87507

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

😴 Boring

Not one story line was ever finished or even tied together. Never actually went into the material.

Great story with interior thinking of so many characters.

Got swept up in this genuinely funny peek into the world of workshopping comedy. Couldn’t put it down, enjoyed a large cast of darkly hilarious characters whose desperation to be funny and anxiety about not being funny supercharge this story about an eventful afternoon in New York.