Book review: Mark Twain is credited with saying that humour is tragedy plus time. In our digital age, though, there is virtually no time or space for tragedies to evolve beyond shock into wistful reflection. Humour has become deadly and comedy has become very serious. Telling an off-colour joke in company can cause one to be exiled from work and even love. Jerry Seinfeld recently complained that because of fears of offending, comedians can’t be funny anymore. To the contrary argument, there has been a recent explosion of stand-up comics from Hannah Gadsby’s revelatory self-exploration, to Chris Rock’s self-reflexive fury, to the brilliance of Hacks, a TV series which explores how an old-school stand-up in the mould of Joan Rivers comes into renewed popularity by hiring a queer comedy writer who has been exiled from a “cool” politically correct TV series because of her own missteps. Jon Stewart has returned to TV to use his pointed comedy to expose the lies and twisted stories that have coloured the US Presidential election. Ironically, comedy has become the sword of exposure. We laugh because it hurts so much.
This is the seedbed for Camille Bordas second novel in English, The Material. Bordas, an award-winning novelist and short story writer born in Paris, raised in Mexico City and currently living in Chicago, uses her new home town as the setting for the novel, which occurs in the course of a day in the life of a comedy stand-up MFA program. The day begins with students preparing for workshop with their established comedy instructor, which is virtually an exercise in public flagellation, and ends with a comedy face-off between the MFA students and members of Chicago’s improvisational institution, Second City.
The plot is similarly improvisational, as we move between the minds of Bordas’ eclectic cast of characters, which include Dorothy, one of the instructors and an established comedienne about to revive her own stand-up career; Kruger, another instructor who is almost famous as well as single except for his pet parrot and his disappointed father Louis; and Ashbee, the self-proclaimed laid-back “token black” teacher.
Bordas’s dialogue is perceptive and funny in a way that hurts.
And then there are the students: Olivia, hesitant to mine her own trauma for laughs; Phil, a people-pleaser who is reluctant to offend; Jo, obsessed with Andy Kaufman and who believes he’s still alive and 40 years into the deep, dark, edgy bit of his “death”; and wonderful Artie, hampered by being “too handsome” and lambasted by his mother’s nudgy ambitions and an absent brother who is an addict shacked up with an older woman somewhere.
The novel begins at a faculty meeting, where they are talking about the imminent arrival of the very famous Manny Reinhardt, contracted to be a guest lecturer, whose reputation has recently been tarnished by revelations from women he has slept with only once but whom he has asked to marry, along with a drunken fisticuffs with a bar patron who questioned his comedic chops.
Bordas’s dialogue is perceptive and funny in a way that hurts. The line between what is a joke and what is life is blurred, as everything the characters experience is mined for comedy. When their life doesn’t provide substantive material, they create situations to evoke humour or paradox. The novel also explores the idea that nothing seems taboo anymore – from the Holocaust, to the chronic illness of one’s child, to molestation – as long as the routine works. Bordas also undermines every cliché in the book, from guns that don’t go off, to a warning of a shooter on campus that turns out to be a prank, to the old wives’ tale that all comedians are depressives. In this novel, the comedians are lonely and often sad but not clinically suicidal. Many of the issues raised in the narrative are never answered, which is unsatisfying but consistent with the quotidian nature of the plot.
Bordas has said that the idea of the novel came about after she’d been teaching for a couple of years and was enjoying the workshop model while watching a lot of comedy. “What would happen if you have someone perform something that needs work? You can’t really get critiqued beforehand, the audience response is the critique. It’s brutal to be up on stage, alone, having to sustain people’s attention. It’s a relentless kind of bravery.”
The Material is relentlessly brave as it illustrates the symbiotic nature of art and life, how time is the tempest that transforms it all.
The Material, by Camille Bordas (Serpent’s Tail, $40), is out now.
