On Wednesdays, three of them had to perform, in turn, a four-to-six-minute routine that the whole class then proceeded to rip apart, joke by joke, beat by beat, until there wasn’t anything left and the budding comedians went home to consider other possible career paths. After searching the internet for what other jobs existed, though, after twenty minutes of this, they already had a joke about it begging to come out, a joke they thought would kill next time they went up for critique, one that played on how unfunny they’d been that last time, how they’d considered retraining, going into plumbing or whatever, counseling, but then realized how bad they would be at that, too (joke-joke-joke), and it would all be so meta, so self-deprecating, no one would have a choice but to laugh and laugh, and just like that, they were at it again—writing.
Except, of course, next workshop, they realized everyone else had gone for it as well, the modest bit, the apology, and their own critique of it was merciless: “It’s been a bit overdone,” they said, “this ‘I’m only good at telling jokes’ stuff.”
School was supposed to widen your horizons, leave you with the feeling that everything was yet to be invented, or reinvented, but after a semester in the comedy program most of the students felt the opposite, that jokes were in limited supply, and that they weren’t finding the ones that were left fast enough.
Their teachers could sympathize. Or at least Dorothy could. She remembered her fear at their age, whenever she wrote a joke, that somebody else was writing the exact same one (or the same one but better, or the same one but worse—all options equally bad) and would tell it to an audience before hers was stage-ready. She had pictured a race back then: comedians, scribbled-on napkins and Xerox-warm paper sheets in hand, rushing to deliver their lines to a faceless man who collected all jokes and would soon whistle the end of the hunt. On good days, that fear of the whistle had kept Dorothy up and writing. On bad ones, it had turned into fantasy—if only that whistle existed, she’d thought, if only someone could blow it now, what a relief it would be, to hear that it was all over, that she could stop trying.
“Were they funny in their application tapes?” Ben Kruger asked her, about their current students.
Kruger had only started teaching in the Stand-Up MFA three months earlier. He wasn’t buying the students’ despair. He believed they were hazing him, that they were being deliberately unfunny to test his commitment as a mentor. It was an egotistical view—no young comedian would ever risk looking bad in front of another, especially one as famous as Kruger—but Kruger had spent more time talking to Hollywood people than comedians lately, and his paranoia was reaching new levels.
“Of course they were funny,” Dorothy said, trying to ignore the question’s subtext, Kruger’s implication that perhaps she and Ashbee were unable to recognize a good bit, raw talent, promising young people.
“So, what,” Kruger said, “they just start sucking when we admit them? They just come here and suck for a year?”
“They don’t suck. Dan is good. Olivia.”
“They don’t suck for a year,” Ashbee said. He’d just joined them in the conference room.
“When do they become good again?”
“End of their first semester,” Ashbee explained, like it was science. “Right around now, in fact. Soon they’ll start doing their impressions of us, and that will be rock bottom for them. You’ll see. They get good again after that.”
“Impressions?”
“It’s pretty embarrassing.”
“But you have to laugh a little,” Dorothy said. “Even when it’s not funny, you have to laugh at at least one thing when someone does an impression of you.”
“I don’t laugh,” Ashbee said. “You can’t start laughing when it’s not funny. That’s the worst thing you can do to a young comedian.”
The job of teaching comedy, Ashbee often said, consisted almost exclusively in sitting there, not laughing, while your students tried something. It could be painful, for all parties involved, but that was how they learned—it was in your silence that they eventually heard something click.
“Well, I always laugh a little when they do me,” Dorothy said. “Maybe it’s a woman thing.”
The room was filling up, a particularly well-attended faculty meeting, Ashbee noted. He remembered that pre-winter-break meetings tended to be, because of the cookies. The Victorianists always made cookies before Christmas.
The Stand-Up MFA was attached to the English Department, which many English professors resented (comedians belonged in Performing Arts, if they belonged anywhere at all in academia, was the thought), but the resentment was civil. Ashbee liked that about academics, that it never went beyond whispers in the hallways, or petitions no one read.
“Should we make an announcement about the show tonight?” Kruger asked.
Their students were performing that evening in a traditional end-of-year battle against the Second City improv troupe.
“No one wants to go to that,” Dorothy said.
Theodore Sword, the current English Department chair, took his seat at the conference table and thanked everyone for coming.
“I know we’re all tired,” he said, “and some of you have class in an hour, so I will keep this brief.”
Kruger, on his notepad, jotted down the words “I’ll be brief: Part One, Section A, Subsection 1.” He was toying with the idea of a bit about academics, how convoluted they could make the simplest proposition. He crossed out the whole thing. “I’ll be brief,” he wrote on the next line. “I’ll be brief for three reasons—” and felt more satisfied with that structure.
“I have news to share,” Sword said, for real this time, not under Kruger’s pen.
No one had expected news. It was the last week of the semester. Last-week meetings were for self-congratulation and snacks.
“I have news to share regarding Manny Reinhardt.”
Kruger stopped doodling. He looked at Dorothy, who looked at Ashbee. They hadn’t been warned that the meeting would be about Manny. For weeks, Manny had been scheduled to be their visiting professor of comedy in the spring, but a student association had raised concerns about the hire, and last Ashbee had heard from Sword, it was time to find a replacement.
“What about him?” someone asked, from Rhetoric. “Did he break anyone else’s nose?”
“There’s borderline behavior with women now, too,” said someone from Theory. “I read about it last night.”
The distinguished professor of medieval studies said she wasn’t at all surprised.
“You could always hear it in his jokes,” she said. “The guy hates women.”
The comedians remained silent. It bothered Dorothy, though, that “just listen to his jokes” comment. As if Manny had only ever written about women. To reduce Manny’s all-encompassing misanthropy to simple misogyny was dishonest, Dorothy thought, or proof that even an overeducated English scholar could fall victim to partial readings, scanning someone’s work for the lines that fed their theory while ignoring those that questioned it. And how had the papers come to discuss Manny’s treatment of women? It had all started with Manny punching a guy at the Comic Strip, Thanksgiving weekend. The guy—an up-and-coming comedian—hadn’t pressed charges, but he’d posted photos online of his broken nose and swollen eye, gaining tens of thousands of followers in the process. He’d been honest, too, about having looked for it (he’d called Manny many names), and for a few days, it had seemed like the internet would sort it out, dividing itself between “boys will be boys” and “nothing ever justifies violence” factions until everyone got tired. But in the last week, bizarre stories had started to emerge. Three women had come forward with accusations of emotional misconduct. It appeared that Manny had slept with each of them at some point, once and only once, proposed marriage that same night, and never called again.
“I’m glad he won’t be coming here,” the person from Theory said. “My kids come do their homework in the teachers’ lounge sometimes.”
“Wait, what? Reinhardt’s a pedophile now?” Vivian Reeve said, from Creative Writing.
Though Ashbee and Dorothy were relieved to hear someone speak up for Manny, they wished it hadn’t come from Creative Writing. Everyone on the Fiction faculty was trying a little too hard to befriend them, probably hoping for some TV connections. Vivian Reeve had cornered Kruger at his first department party back in September, to flatter him, to share with him her idea that comedians were to the twenty-first century what novelists had been to the twentieth, the artists that the public turned to for enlightenment, for comfort and understanding. They were the new social critics. More Americans had streamed Kruger’s special the week it had come out on Netflix than would read a novel that year, she’d told him, numbers that Kruger had been flattered by, but unable to verify.
“The man is fifty-four,” the distinguished professor said. “All these women he slept with were, like, twenty-five. Sound like children to me.”
“He’s not on trial for being gross,” Vivian Reeve said.
“He’s not on trial at all,” Sword reminded everyone. “So let’s go back to the question of his hire.”
“What hire?” one of the Victorianists asked. “There’s no hire. We can’t hire a visiting creep.”
Sword informed her and everyone else in attendance that in spite of undergraduate agitation, in spite of the Comedy Strip altercation and the…persistent marriage proposals, the university had confirmed Manny Reinhardt’s hire.
“The paperwork is in. Mr. Reinhardt signed it this morning.”
Kruger glanced at Ashbee and Dorothy. They were beaming. He tried to force a smile. Kruger hadn’t shared this with them, but he’d been pleased with Manny’s fall from grace. Not that he disliked the guy (the guy was hilarious), but the idea of Reinhardt’s forced retirement didn’t sound half-bad. More room for Kruger, Kruger thought. He believed it worked that way, that getting the status and respect you deserved was only a matter of room being made for them by people who’d recently lost both. Also, maybe he did dislike Manny a little. He was pretty sure Manny disliked him. Years ago, when asked in an interview who the most interesting young comedians were, Manny hadn’t named Kruger, an omission Kruger had interpreted as intentional, a direct insult.
Sword wasn’t able to say anything for a while. Whose decision was this? his colleagues asked. What kind of PR nightmare was the administration devising for itself? Hiring a man with a history of violence? Of emotional misconduct? Even just for a semester? This would be national news, the professors said, and they seemed to understand what that meant as they said it, their names possibly printed in The New York Times, potential email invitations to write an op-ed, and not just for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Look, I don’t like this any more than you do,” Sword managed to say once the room had started recycling arguments (except he did, he did like it, he was a big fan of Manny Reinhardt’s and couldn’t wait to meet him). “But my hands are tied. The decision is coming from way up.”
“Whose decision is it exactly?”
“It’s coming from way up,” Sword repeated. “And the dean signed on already. It’s a done deal.”
These were thuggish methods, half of the room agreed. Unacceptable. What next? What next if the department gave in to upper administration thugs? Should they simply let them decide whom to hire from now on? Let them handle the curricula, the committees? Place their own friends in teaching positions to give them honorable front jobs? This notion of a professor mafia gave Ashbee the ghost of an idea for a bit: wise guys given front jobs in academia rather than on construction sites, what that would look like. The cast of The Sopranos teaching linguistics. Paulie Walnuts misunderstanding Virginia Woolf. Or better yet, actually, funnier, Paulie Walnuts relating to Virginia Woolf, feeling her struggles deeply. Ashbee waved away the image as quickly as it came. He’d vowed never to let his teaching life encroach upon his comedian life, to not turn into one of those people in Creative Writing who could only write campus novels once they became teachers. It wasn’t easy, but he’d held himself to it. As the founder of Stand-Up as an academic discipline (the Chicago MFA had been the first of its kind), Ashbee could’ve been first on many jokes to be made about the job, but he’d refrained. Now that comedy programs had opened all over the country, teaching comedians went for it, used their students as material, and used their colleagues, too—the campus setting in general. They made fun of the concept onstage, the concept of teaching comedy, teaching people how to be funny. They all presented it as an impossible task and threw their own students under the bus as proof, quoting their worst jokes, all the while cashing the university’s biweekly checks. Ashbee believed that using your students as comedy fodder was an abuse of power, but he’d come to understand that the kids actually sought it, the onstage nod. Better to be made fun of by a famous comedian than never mentioned at all. He looked forward to retirement.
Sword glanced at his watch and then through the window, down all nine floors to the L train platform he would later stand on himself, when it was time to go home. Everything was gray, the platform, the rails, the buildings and the air around them, everything appeared crusted in salt post-blizzard, as if salt itself had fallen from the clouds, and not snow. This was Chicago to him, this texture. He was relieved whenever the city went back to it. First signs of winter made Lydia melancholy, though, more than usual, and he felt like a bad husband for finding beauty in the sky’s color, that finger-blended pencil. He’d just taught his last class of the semester. After weeks of sad stories and black-and-white films, he’d wanted to end his Epiphany seminar on a light note, discuss romantic comedies, make fun of all the running involved in romantic epiphanies. The students hadn’t gotten it. When they realized they loved someone, they’d said (and they’d said this as if it happened to them once a month), they could just text them.
Sword heard a colleague say the word “unbearable” and remembered at once where he was—not on the L platform yet, not yet home, not only in a department meeting but running it. He made accidental eye contact with Dorothy as he turned his gaze back to the room, and wondered if he should hold it (at the risk of coming off as predatory) or break it immediately (at the risk of coming off as the scared-of-women type). Dorothy broke it first to look down at her nails. She’d been thinking about painting them lately. Something she’d never done before. Would it be weird to start in her late forties? she wondered. Would it look desperate? She hadn’t been onstage in years, but she had a new special in preproduction, and she wondered about presentation, how she should present herself now, whether to stick to what she’d done her whole career (her appearance and her sex an afterthought, things that, in an ideal world, would go unnoticed, so focused would the audience be on the strength of her writing) or change it up to better fit the times, hop onstage all made up and bare-legged. She hated her legs. Not that there was anything wrong with them, really, but who needed to see them?
The meeting ended and she stayed behind in the conference room with Kruger and Ashbee. One of them should contact Manny, they decided, make him feel welcome.
“When’s the last time you heard from him?” Dorothy asked Ashbee.
Ashbee had been the one to send Manny the invitation to teach with them for a semester. He hadn’t expected him to agree—this was an invitation Manny had declined every fall since the program had started. Ashbee usually dealt with Manny’s agent, but Manny had responded directly this time. He’d just taped a new special, and he wouldn’t be touring during the months Ashbee mentioned: the stars were aligning, for once, and he’d be delighted to give teaching a try. “These kids are my son’s age,” Manny had also written. “Maybe this will help me understand his generation better.” He’d written to Ashbee as if Ashbee had been part of his life the last thirty years. Ashbee barely even knew Manny had a son. Hadn’t really spent any time with Manny since the nineties, and even then, it had been somewhat forced, circumstantial, only brought about by the sudden shrinking of New York’s comedy scene, all those clubs closing one after the other, Ashbee and Manny two of a handful of guys to hold on for dear life, to fight for time on the remaining stages. They were often the last ones to leave a club back then—Manny because he loved drinking, Ashbee because he needed to tell himself he’d squeezed out the night’s every possibility, met everyone there was to meet. They hadn’t liked each other much.
“We exchanged a few emails back in September,” Ashbee told Dorothy. “Practical stuff about the program.”
“And since the…accusations?” Dorothy said.
She wasn’t sure what to call what was happening to Manny. She thought punching someone was worse than asking women to marry you, but no one seemed to care about the punching anymore. What people seemed to find important was whether Manny had offered marriage before or after he’d had sex with the women. Dorothy couldn’t quite see what difference that made.
“Since the accusations, we haven’t spoken,” Ashbee said.
Dorothy looked at Kruger.
“You?” she said. “You talked to him lately?”
Kruger had vastly exaggerated his connection to Manny. They shared an agent, and had done a charity event in Los Angeles together the previous year, but that was about it. The only words they’d exchanged that night had concerned the food in the greenroom. Three months ago, he’d heard Manny on a podcast poking fun at comedians who tried to make it as serious actors, and because the movie Kruger had shot with Meryl Streep was about to come out, he’d taken it as another jab at him specifically.
“We haven’t been in touch,” Kruger said. “I don’t think I should be the one to call him anyway.”
“Why not?”
Kruger thought of his father then, who hadn’t answered or returned his calls the last couple of days. He was probably just tired, Kruger thought. The nursing home would’ve told him by now if something had happened.
“I don’t think he likes me very much,” he said, about Manny. “Plus, I’m new to the program. It’s probably better if one of you walks him through everything.”
It was enough of an excuse, but Kruger added more, for extra protection. He was teaching in just a bit. He had a phone call scheduled with his agent after that, and then the battle against Second City tonight.
“Nothing says we have to call him today,” Ashbee said.
“Really, I think it’s better if Dorothy calls him,” Kruger said.
“Why’s that?” Dorothy asked.
Kruger wondered which she would be least offended by: if he called her a woman, or if he called her a girl.
“Because you’re a girl,” he said.
Dorothy raised an eyebrow. She knew what he meant, of course.
“Ben’s right,” Ashbee said. “It’s stronger if it comes from you. He’ll know you’re not one of the crazy ones, always siding with the women no matter what. And you can reassure him that our female students aren’t either.”
“I don’t know what our female students think,” Dorothy said.
She’d heard Olivia talking about it with Artie, though, before their improv class on Monday. How the accusations against Manny were counterproductive because they made women look weak, and calculating, and whiny. Who cared whether Manny proposed or not? Olivia had asked Artie. What did it matter whether he’d talked about marriage before or after sex? People said that if he’d mentioned it before, then he’d purposely misled the girl. But then what did it say about the girl? That she’d only fucked a celebrity she wasn’t attracted to because she pictured financial security on the other side of it? Was that a good reason to sleep with someone? This hadn’t been Dorothy’s conversation to step into, and so she hadn’t, but she’d thought that Olivia was forgetting to consider the small possibility that all these women had been in love with Manny (people did that sometimes, fall in love instantly), that they’d believed it was mutual and had been hurt when they’d realized Manny would never call. Not that being heartbroken gave you any right to talk to the press, but it did make Dorothy feel for the women. When Manny had told her, almost thirty years earlier (after they’d had sex), that maybe they should get married, she’d known to laugh in his face, but still. There’d been a part of her that hoped he wasn’t kidding.
“I guess I’ll give him a call,” she told Kruger and Ashbee, not looking at either.