Graduate school can be hell. The world of stand-up comedy can be hell. The competition in both can be fierce, and the rewards can be chimerical, to put it gently. So to set a novel in the world of an MFA program for stand-ups is funny, but it’s also painful.

Camille Bordas’s “The Material,” about the students and faculty at a fictional graduate program for comics in Chicago, is a prolonged exploration of where jokes come from, their impact and their staying power. The material of the title can refer to two things: the jokes, of course, but also the internal wrestling of the aspiring stand-ups – their daydreams, memories, lusts, frustrations and ambitions; the wells from which the jokes spring.

Review

Courtesy of Random House

“The Material”

By Camille Bordas

Random House. 272 pages.

$28

The program’s students and teachers struggle with general discontent and a lack of success in the field. They are all in free fall of one kind or another, and their stories vary in poignancy based on the degree to which they know it.

There’s nothing funny about how the faculty members treat the students. One teacher, Ashbee, considers it his job to make no facial response whatsoever while students practice their routines. Kruger, a new hire, asks a colleague: “So … they just start sucking when we admit them? They just come here and suck for a year?”

A student named Artie, when not pondering why he isn’t funnier (before, after and while performing) or worrying about his junkie brother, whom he once looked up to, is deeply concerned with how his girlfriend, a fellow student named Olivia, is treating him. His own mother doesn’t find his jokes particularly amusing, even going to the trouble of making a list for him of things he can’t joke about onstage. Olivia worries about her jokes and how to navigate what is obviously a disappointing relationship with Artie, ultimately deciding that capitalizing on the grain of talent he possesses might be more useful to her than nurturing it.

The narrative makes detours into social issues: One scene finds a school shooter on campus, with two faculty members trapped in lockdown. The impending arrival of a visiting professor named Manny spurs controversy because of his past indiscretions, which include proposing to students when he’s drunk and punching a comedian in the face. When he’s not composing a public apology (at the behest of his agent), he’s pondering his decayed relationship with his grown son and whether he should use that son’s early illness, which involved severe digestive issues, in a bit. Manny conceives of jokes as “the thoughts people exuded and rejected all day,” and his mission is “to grab onto the most horrible of these thoughts and shape them right in order to serve them back to those who’d run away from them.” Easy laughs? Not exactly.

The milieu Bordas has conjured is a serious one. The book includes one scenario that may be painfully familiar to those who have been in workshops: the class in which your fellow students dissect and gradually annihilate your work, and then you do the same to theirs, and then everyone goes home and wallows in misery. But it’s part of the process, so it’s OK – or is it?

The novel builds toward a climax that puts the “set” in set piece, an evening at a comedy club where the students compete against members of the famed Second City improv troupe to see who gets more laughs. The scene turns into a melee, but of inner contemplations and nail-biting – the routines themselves are almost beside the point.

“The Material” could best be described as comedic in the Dantesque sense. Characters become emblems of their own tragic flaws while chasing the carrot of success, which may turn out to be plastic. But if it’s not a laugh riot, Bordas’s novel is insightful, compassionate, biting and honest. There are few resounding gags, but the book offers deeper rewards than laughter.

Max Winter is the author of “The Pictures” and “Walking Among Them” and a co-editor of the press Solid Objects.