' THE MATERIAL ' : BY CAMILLE BORDAS

 

It's all in the timing. Everyone's a critic - and now, it seems, a comedian too. Actual oneliners are what flourish on the platform now known with titanium self-seriousness as X.

'' Content creators,'' a terrible umbrella term that covers some very funny and talented people, are arguably your new late night hosts, yukking it up over there on TikTok.

Camille Bordas's '' The Material '' examines this changing state of professional humour, and manages to be an amusing variation on the campus novel too.

Only a few fleeting references - to the philosopher Henri Bergson's essay on laughter, the poet Charles Baudelaire and the highly stylized 1961 film '' Last Year at Marienbad '' - hint that the author's first language was French.

There is no tentativeness about the English language, but rather a heightened sensitivity. When and how, one character muses, did Apple decide to hijack the psyche [ '' You have a new memory ''] and pelt us with old selfies? 

'' More of that imprecision, he thought, more of that turning words into more or less than they actually were - manicures into 'self care,' meat into 'protein'. A photo wasn't a memory. A photo was a photo.'' 

In our present-day screenpolis of constant entertainment and commerce, the performers in '' The Material '' agonize over the integrity of comedy as live art form. What, they are all wondering in various ways, is OK to use and by whom?

Addiction? The Holocaust? Child molestation? Gender and race. 

You get the feeling that Bordas, an assistant professor herself at the University of Florida and a widely published writer of short stories, wants to put wokeness if not to bed, then down for a nice nap.

The same character who deplores spoon-fed Apple Memories wants a word '' for what 'rape' '' used to mean.'' 

Ashbee, the sole Black professor in the program, admits that he enjoys being the token hire, and theorizes wearily that '' soon, comedians would only be able to joke about the other species if they wanted to stay clear of scandal. 

After that, it would only be a question of time before people started getting offended on behalf of animals in question, but still, there was a window there for now.''     

'' The Material '' even considers whether guns can be funny.

There are next to no major events in this novel, which builds toward a laugh-off battle. '' Take my smartphone - please,'' routine.

The World Students Society thanks Alexandra Jacobs.