In 2017, my favorite book of the year was How to Behave in a Crowd, by an author I hadn’t heard of before but whom I immediately came to love. It went on to win the CHIRBy Award in Fiction that year, and I eagerly awaited the next book by Camille Bordas.
And the next book by Bordas has arrived! The Material is a novel that follows a cast of characters who are connected to a Comedy MFA program at a university in Chicago. Over the course of the novel, we jump from student, to instructor, to controversial guest-faculty comedian, and back to the students. Can these kids actually learn to be funny? How does one excavate the everyday bits of life and turn them into comedy? And who gets to joke without limitations?
If you’re wondering if a book about a Comedy MFA program is funny, you’re in luck: it is both funny and perceptive. Being in each character’s head for long stretches at a time – as they navigate their own messy lives while making notes for their stand-up bit later – showcases Bordas’ skill at examining what it means to live and create art amidst the turmoil and heartbreak of the world.
I was grateful to speak with Camille Bordas over Zoom about her newest novel. The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sara Cutaia
As far as I know, there’s no Comedy MFA like the one in this book. So I have to ask: where did you learn to be so funny?
Camille Bordas
First of all, thank you. It’s funny because people say my work is funny a lot and it’s not always what I set out to do. And I remember with my first book, when it came out in France, I got that a lot. I was almost insulted because I wanted to be a serious writer. Which is weird because all the books I love made me laugh at some point. I think you can have a mix of both. So, I don’t know. I think I learned it from my siblings, maybe. I look at things at a weird angle, being the last of four children. You get cues from your siblings. And there’s not a lot of room for you when you’re the youngest, so whenever you want to jump in, if you’re going to interrupt their conversation, it needs to be worth it, to make them laugh.
Sara Cutaia
You’re not originally from Chicago. But this book takes place here and has quite a bit of “establishing shots” that remind us of the setting. Was the Chicago setting intentional, or something that you found happening as you started to write?
Camille Bordas
I was writing the novel when we were living in Florida and I missed Chicago a lot. I was working, teaching in a creative writing MFA, and we’re in a very small college town, which I think is great surroundings for creative writing MFA, but not necessarily for stand-up comics. I’m like, they’re gonna have to do things like showcases and open mics and stuff, you need the audience to renew itself a little bit more than a campus does. So I knew it was going to be in a big city and Chicago was the best. It maybe could have been in New York City. I know New York City fairly well, as well. But, you know, it seemed like I was missing Chicago for a reason. And it had started creeping into my short stories as well.
Sara Cutaia
There aren’t enough books about or set in Chicago! I was a fan. And I went to school at Columbia College, right there on Michigan Ave. I could feel those surroundings very vividly.
Camille Bordas
Yeah, I didn’t want to name a school. But yes, Columbia, Roosevelt, SAIC. They’re all around downtown. Take your pick.
Sara Cutaia
Also, why don’t we have Comedy MFAs? Feels like we should!
Camille Bordas
The book started because I thought it was a funny premise. And usually when I have a premise idea, it doesn’t end up getting very far, but I remained excited about this one. At first I thought it was ridiculous. And then the more I wrote, I was like, this is so dumb, we should definitely have Comedy MFA programs.
Sara Cutaia
Can you talk a little more about that? How the idea for this book came about?
Camille Bordas
When I start a project, it’s usually like there’s a little voice in my head, there’s a character or something, and I kind of just see what happens to them. The book will take shape as I write it. But for this one, I’d been teaching for a couple years and I was really enjoying the workshop model. I was seeing how a little society creates itself and how the social life is very tied to the work-life, artistic-life, like there’s so much that happens in that very reduced cast of characters. Even if it’s a lot of characters for a novel, in life it’s a very small cast of characters and they really become very close.
And then I was also watching a lot of comedy. Stand-up comics really blew up in the last ten years, and I wasn’t aware of its existence really before I moved to America – it’s a very American art form. It got me thinking a lot about the workshop model in comedy, too. Like, 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 ripe for very raw emotion. It’s kind of like a more violent MFA in creative writing – it’s brutal to be up on stage, alone, having to sustain people’s attention. It’s a relentless kind of bravery.
Sara Cutaia
These characters experience sadness and humor side by side, which feels so authentic to how we live every day, especially as artists. Everything is mixed up together. Is that something you were trying to showcase in this novel?
Camille Bordas
I think I’m always trying to do that, yeah. If you see someone fall in front of you, awkwardly, you’re probably going to laugh at first, even though it’s horrible. It’s not like you can just turn that off inside of you when something tragic happens in life, either. I think it’s the only kind of writing that interests me. Something that tries to mix both sadness and humor. It’s not so much a decision that I make because, as I was saying, I would actually like to turn off the funny at times!
Sara Cutaia
Even with this book, which is about actual aspiring comedians?
Camille Bordas
Yeah! I thought: if I try to be too funny, then people are going to think that I’m trying to actually write stand-up routines, and they’re not good stand-up routines. These are failed stand-up routines most of the time… That’s why it is very useful to have a cast of aspiring comedians, because then they get to be not so funny as they try and fail.
Sara Cutaia
Many of the comedy students discuss—both with each other and introspectively—what they consider off-limits and offensive to joke about. What are your thoughts on this topic?
Camille Bordas
A few years ago, I would have said anyone gets to joke about anything. And when I started this book, I was very much in that mindframe still. And then I wrote Phil’s character which was supposed to be the person who has all these questions: What is punching down? What is punching up? What am I doing? How can I do something that is mindful of everyone’s feelings? At first it was kind of a joke character, he’s the punching bag for his classmates, basically. But as I wrote, I realized I actually didn’t want him to become my punching bag. He ended up in this MFA for a reason. He’s funny, and he’s really genuinely concerned about offending people. It’s not just like a political stance or like something to make himself look good. The more I started thinking about the limits, I realized the limits change all the time. Comedians have always had to play by a set of rules, for every time period they’ve lived in. It’s kind of actually freeing in some ways. All you have to do is play within the limit.
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.
Sara Cutaia
I’d like to talk about the structure of the book. It takes place over one day, and to make that last the length of a novel, there’s a lot of stretching that has to be done, specifically with weaving in and out of characters’ thoughts and inner monologues. When you’re writing – because I know you’re a short story writer as well – was this expansion something that came naturally? Or did you have to finesse that whenever you decided this was going to be a longer project?
Camille Bordas
It’s all very exploratory when I start something. When I started, I thought maybe it would be a year or the length of the MFA program. But 50 or 60 pages in, only one hour had elapsed. Some characters wanted to really pause on a memory for whole pages. Once I decided to let the book be what it wanted, I kind of went with it. It was a bit freeing, because I could pause, and dive into a character’s head. It’s really nice when you discover something about your purpose as you’re writing it. And so I’ve had a lot of fun with it.
Sara Cutaia
Who are some of your favorite comedians, either past or present?
Camille Bordas
Okay, that’s a question I should prepare for. When I was a kid, I was a really big fan of Monty Python. But they’re not stand-ups. And I wouldn’t say that I did much research for this book, but the little research I did on the internet triggered Instagram to send me a lot of comedian videos and I keep seeing all these comedians that I’ve never heard of because they don’t have specials or whatever. So I’ve been watching a lot of quick clips of Chicago comedians. Let’s see: I love Bill Burr. Bill Burr makes me laugh until it hurts sometimes. His energy, of nonstop screaming… Matteo Lane, from Chicago, is the same. Love those guys.
FICTION
The Material
By Camille Bordas
Random House
Published June 11, 2024
