Camille Bordas on What Stand-Up Comedy Can Teach Writing Workshops About Growing Thicker Skin

My first introduction to Camille Bordas came through her stories in the New Yorker—perfectly formed marvels, funny, skeptical, self-aware, and humane. I loved them for their seeming lightness: there was clearly a super-keen intellect at work, but one keen and confident enough to express itself as simply as possible, to let itself be fully metabolized by the story, with no showy remainder. And all this (disturbingly for the monoglot American) in her second language.

It was a banner day for my ego when I learned she’d been reading my stuff, as well. Since then we’ve corresponded but have never met; we both live in midwestern cities but they are separated, American-style, by a seven-hour drive. So the following interview, on the occasion of the publication of Camille’s wonderful fourth novel, and second in English, was conducted by email.

–Adam Ehrlich Sachs

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Adam Ehrlich Sachs: The Material is set in a dystopia where MFA programs in Stand-Up Comedy have spread across the country. Until recently you taught at an MFA in Creative Writing. I couldn’t help (forgive me) but wonder about the relation between them.

Sometimes you seem to imply a reductio ad absurdum: Now we think we can teach good writing, next we’ll imagine we can impart a sense of humor. But sometimes the Stand-Up students seem like the sane ones, pragmatically honing punch lines, believing only in laughter, while writers chase phantoms like epiphany, truth, and meaning.

I guess my question is, if we took two identical twins, and raised them in isolation from society until age twenty-two, and then enrolled one in an MFA in Stand-Up Comedy and one in an MFA in Creative Writing, would you bet on the first emerging a funny comic or the second emerging an interesting writer? 

Camille Bordas: How isolated are we talking? Do the twins know that they’re twins? Do they know that not everyone is a twin? I understand that your question is not a hundred percent serious, but now, I can’t help but wonder at the logistics, whether the twins have access to novels/printed language at all, whether they’re being raised together, whether the person doing the raising actually interacts with them or just slides food through a hole in the wall….

My first impulse, though, was to say that because people usually tend to make another person laugh (may it only ever be that one person) before they can write anything decent, I would bet on the stand-up twin to be more successful, but who knows? Who are his teachers? So many variables.

What I will say is that, in spite of what some characters in my novel might argue, I am myself not cynical about teaching writing at all. I loved teaching workshop, actually (maybe it helped that I was doing it at a great MFA program, where we picked students that were extremely talented to begin with).

But I’ll grant you that I was puzzled by Creative Writing MFAs when I first moved to America, in 2012. They didn’t exist in France at the time. “Creative writing” as an academic discipline meant absolutely nothing to me. So the book probably feeds off some thoughts I might’ve had at the time, except now applied to the idea of an MFA in Stand-Up.

There are obvious similarities between the two (the workshop model, electives in other disciplines, etc.), but the immediate difference I came upon while imagining this Stand-Up class was that aspiring comedians would have to have thicker skin than aspiring novelists. They know if their bit is good or not before their classmates start critiquing it: they know if people laughed or not.

The audience/classmates can’t really soften the blow if no one laughed. All they can do is say why it wasn’t funny. Whereas if something doesn’t quite work in a piece of fiction, your classmates and workshop teacher have had some time to think about nice ways to phrase it.

It seems you don’t need to tread so carefully around comedians. No one really gets offended in my book. They all say horrible things to each other and then move on. That was fun for me to write. Not everything needs to have consequence.

Another thing that interested me about comedians vs novelists was that, as you say, they don’t seem to be looking for meaning or truth. Only the funniest thing. They don’t seem to care either that what they say could be construed as their actual, personal beliefs, so they just say whatever they want.

Whereas it feels to me at times that novelists today might be too careful how their books make them look, how they personally come off. It feels like some authors decided to take up a duty to write morally irreproachable novels, which are inherently uninteresting to me. Comedians fascinate me because they still seem to inhabit this amoral realm: what counts is not the goodness of the thought, but how funny it is. And they tend to be great editors of their own work, too, which fiction writers aren’t always.

AES: You do have one comedy student, Phil, who cares about the goodness, or apparent goodness, of his thoughts. One of his first lines, as the other students are naming their favorite comics, is: “I don’t hear a lot of female names.” We’re prepared to hate him.

Yet later on, when you bring us into his head, he becomes (and this is part of what I love about this book, and your work) a surprisingly sympathetic character. Pathetic, but sympathetic. Behind the shibboleths about punching up and down is a genuine desire to be good and genuine confusion about what’s up and what’s down. It won’t help him be funny, but it’s not cynical or calculating.

The same is true of the other characters: the more time we spend in their heads, the more complicated and ambivalent they become, and the more we like them. Does that reflect your feelings about people in general? Or is it a selection effect: the only characters worth writing about are those for whom this is true? Is there anyone you’ve gotten to know well who, despite having all of their mental faculties intact, remains just as simple and superficial as the moment you met them?

Could you write a character whom you like less and less the more time you spend in their heads, and wind up despising? 

CB: For a second I thought you were going to ask me to name names! But it’s actually pretty rare for me to meet people with no redeemable qualities. It did happen once or twice, though. I suspect they wouldn’t be fun to write about.

But anyway: Phil! I’m really glad to hear that you somewhat sympathized with him. I was looking for ways to make this happen, because he is kind of his classmates’ punching bag throughout the novel, and I didn’t want him to look like he was mine as well. He started off as fairly one-dimensional, I won’t lie, but then the more I wrote, the more interested I became in finding out what he had to say beyond the slogans. He was there, after all, in stand-up school, petrified at the thought of offending anybody.

I was curious what type of experience and thought-processes had brought him to that point of paralysis. I’m kind of old-school; I grew up hearing you can’t please everyone, and that if you’re making any kind of art, some people will like it and some will hate it (though mostly, they’ll be indifferent to it), some will be offended by it and think it crossed a line, while others will dismiss it because it didn’t go far enough.

Yet there seems to be this belief today (maybe not so much in books yet, but in Hollywood for sure) that some works of art can be for everyone. And because my first impulse was to dismiss this idea (and perhaps consider it dangerous), I became genuinely interested in the kinds of people who would hold it. They can’t all be cynics, as you say. It’s not all marketing pulling the strings to get us to spend some cash. Some people must actually believe it or want it to be possible for laudable reasons.

That’s how Phil became interesting to me—became more than a foil for my dubiousness, or the butt of a joke. There is some naivety in his belief that his work can ever be to everyone’s taste, but naivety doesn’t mean lack of intelligence or good reasoning skills. So, I loved to get to the bottom of it.

AES: Kruger, one of your professor-comedians, has this thought:

How could you tell something was finished? When you worked on a bit, it quickly ceased being funny to you….Tightening a bit could feel right, sharpening it could make you feel smarter, but after a while, what you couldn’t count on was knowing whether it was funny at all. You had to rely on others for that. And Kruger…didn’t much like others, or trust them.

This got me thinking about how other writers have dealt with the problem. There’s Kafka’s solution with “The Judgment”: write it fast, all at once, while it’s fresh, and then never touch it again. Hard to do with longer works. There’s the thing I’ve heard some people do of putting work in a drawer for long enough that they can engage with it as a stranger.

But those people seem like aliens to me, very patient aliens. And then there are the feedback-seekers. But that, as Kruger notes, requires trusting other people. No good options. Do you do one of these? Something else? How do you know when something is finished?

CB: I wish I could follow the Kafka method, but I’m way too slow of a writer for any kind of momentum to ever build. I average a story a year, a novel every five. I have things in drawers, yes, but only because my husband forces me to keep everything I write. Everything that didn’t become a story or a novel I put in a box in a closet and never look at again.

Although last time we moved, I glanced at the pages on top of the box before I taped it, and I barely recognized what I saw as anything I’d written. So I guess I could’ve engaged with it as a stranger, had I not been in the middle of moving and writing another book.

But I don’t have a lot of curiosity for the box’s contents, to be honest. I see it as stuff I needed to do to get to the book I really wanted to write, necessary failures, like when you first learn to write cursive in school and they make you write lines of As and Bs—there are a lot of ugly attempts before you reach anything decent, but then, once you do, you don’t need to refer to those notebooks every time you want to shape an A or a B.

Also, I never have big ideas about where a book should go, so the things I give up on only ever feel like voices that didn’t quite work, not big projects to revisit in ten years. I don’t ever outline. Anything I work on kind of dictates its shape as I write it (I didn’t know until I was about a third into this book, for example, that it would only take place over the course of a day—it just became obvious after a while).

So same goes with endings. As I write, I usually get to a point when I feel things are coalescing just right, that we’re getting to the finish line, and one of my main fears is actually to write past that line. Like, I don’t see myself ever dragging out an ending, adding a coda, a post-script, or worse, doing a recap of everything that happened to make sure everyone understands we’re wrapping up.

I think that due to this fear of overstaying my welcome, some of my endings may appear abrupt to some readers, or feel arbitrary. But I don’t mind that. George Saunders said that writing an ending was “stopping without sucking,” and that’s my aim. I don’t need big finales in the fiction I love, so I don’t feel pressure to reach them in my own work.

If the reader has made it to the end, then presumably there were joys to be found along the way, and an ending need only honor the rest of the book, perhaps by slightly tilting the story on its axis for one final jolt, allowing the last few lines to echo with all those that came before.

AES: There’s a concern in the novel about what the internet means for comedy, not just in terms of censoriousness and groupthink, but as competition, the speed and magnitude of it: “Jokes were coming in too fast.” I’m wondering if you’ve felt your writing change at all to deal with that competition?

For example, when I first started writing, and thought interesting visual descriptions were a requirement of fiction, I’d sometimes Google a metaphor I’d come up with to make sure no one else had already come up with it—and invariably someone had, or a dozen or a hundred people. Which says something about the poverty of my visual imagination, but also, I think, about the internet, and which parts of human creativity will be first to be rendered obsolete by it.

I sometimes think that at a sentence level, the individual thought or image or turn-of-phrase, we’re doomed, and our comparative advantage, if we have any, will be at a broader scale: plot, form, structure. That AI will spit out Nabokov-level similes before it comes up with the conceit for Pale Fire.

Or is it precisely the other way around? Maybe I’m just justifying my own deficiencies. What do you think? Do you fear the large language model?

CB: I must be way more delusional than you because I haven’t spent any time thinking about this at all. For the most part, I live in denial that A. I. will ever come for my job. Maybe it’s because the large language model always makes me think of that Borges story, “The Library of Babel,” in which every possible 410-page book exists, their contents mostly formless and chaotic, only very occasionally sensical.

No one can ever find a book worth reading in this library. However, everyone also knows that the best book in the world is in there somewhere. But they’ll be driven to madness trying to find it.

Because of its computing capabilities, ChatGPT may one day be able to write the perfect novel for each individual human, but then each person would still have to find it among trillions of miles of horrible prose, and who has time for this? It might still be worth it to read those “imperfect” novels carefully put together by other human brains—at least you know the imperfection comes from someone actively trying to do something great.

But now that I’ve spent a few minutes thinking about your question, I notice that my impulse is the same as yours: I’m already trying to rationalize why my strengths as a writer would be the last that A. I. would master. As I said, I’m not plot-oriented. I only start thinking about structure once I’m well underway, so the idea that A. I. will soon be able to generate decent plots doesn’t quite bother me. It’s not hard for me to imagine it swallowing and digesting a million books’ worth of plots and spitting out a good one, perhaps even a wholly original conceit.

But the outline would still have to be filled in in a way that sustains a reader’s interest. And that’s when I become dubious of A. I.’s abilities. For example: what I feel I’m good at as a writer is editing myself, and more specifically, deleting stuff. I’m not a minimalist by any stretch, but I’d say I’m pretty economical. I’m not good at describing things either, so unless it’s absolutely necessary for a reader’s comprehension of a scene, I just won’t do it—no need to waste anyone’s time.

What I obsess over is packing the most punch in a sentence, paragraph, piece of dialogue, and, in order to get to a satisfying point, I find I have to delete a fairly large portion of what I write every day. And it may sound new-agey, but I’m convinced that the reader feels it on the other side, that something has been painstakingly carved out rather than merely piled upon the previous stuff.

Is that the Hemingway thing I’m describing? The iceberg theory? I think there’s a lot of power in deliberate omission, that a great book is also made of all the things that its author cut out, the syllables he shaved off, the metaphor he decided against. These cuts are still little ghosts haunting the book, I think, giving it more weight. So my own personal delusion is that it is in this kind of control at the sentence level that human creativity stands a chance.

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The Material by Camille Bordas is available via Random House.