Reader's Digest: July 27, 2024

When my mother-in-law told me to read The Material, a novel about would-be stand-up comics by Camille Bordas, she wasn’t being “rude, overbearing, [or] obnoxious”; this was not the premise of a joke in which a domineering busybody nags her daughter’s husband. It was excellent advice.

The Material is set in an alternative America in which MFA Programs in Stand-Up Comedy are as common as MFAs in Creative Writing. We spend a winter’s day with teachers and students at a nameless college in Chicago, preparing to do battle for comedic honours against improv acolytes from Second City on the stage of The Empty Bottle.

It’s a funny, inconclusively analytical book about the vocation of the stand-up—the patient extraction of humour from anything and everything that happens—that patiently extracts the humour from its protagonists’ everyday lives. There are semi-dramatic incidents and interactions, which I won’t spoil here, but the drift of the book is that it could have been written about any day a…