This animosity between club comics and nerd comics has long existed; in the mid-1990s club comics derisively referred to the alternative-comedy scene as the “alternative to comedy” scene. Burr’s rant was simply the latest swipe. But what I think really worries Burr (and I admit I share his concern) is not that comedy nerds aren’t reverent enough to stand-up traditions. It’s that they’re too reverent — and that all this reverence, this study and dissection, this niceness, threatens to ruin a form of entertainment that has stridently avoided being declawed. That comedy nerds, like overexuberant fanboys, will effectively love, nurture and respect stand-up comedy to death.

I am the prototypical comedy nerd. I can remember a time when loving comedy was not cool; all it got you was chased home from school. Still, as a kid, I memorized George Carlin and Bill Cosby albums. We performed Monty Python skits at recess. In 1980, I paid $5 to see a Steve Martin impersonator perform excerpts from “A Wild and Crazy Guy” at Woodroffe High School in Ottawa. In 1982, after John Belushi died, I held a toga-party wake (for which I was thoroughly grounded). I squeaked through university and in 1989 went to London, where I ran a small comedy club called the Canal Cafe.

When I returned to Toronto, I began writing about comedy for an alternative weekly and by the mid-1990s had a weekly column in The Toronto Star. I reviewed live shows and wrote features. It led to my first book, “Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy” (in retrospect, a title so boring that it almost seems like parody). It was a strange beat. I spent half my time taking heat from the comedians for daring to criticize their work and the rest trying to convince editors that comedy was worthy of coverage. Being a comedy nerd meant being a freak. A girlfriend of mine once confessed that she was more disturbed that I went out to see comedy five times a week than she would be if I frequented prostitutes. “There is something about you needing to pay people to make you laugh that is really suspect,” she said. “At least sex I could understand.”

My strange obsession allowed me to witness the blossoming of the alternative scene. And I learned that the biggest misconception about it is that it’s a reaction against club comedians. It’s not — it was a reaction by club comedians against club comedy; against the model in which comedy was important but the comedian was not. In the 1980s, stand-up boomed, and even mediocre acts could make a living. By 1989, however, the boom was over. The recession hit. People spent less money going out. Bars replaced comedy with karaoke machines, which were less of a hassle to deal with and could be stored in the trunk of the club owner’s car. “Comics,” the stand-up comic Bobcat Goldthwait once told me in an interview, “occasionally want air if you put them in the trunk.”

In his podcast, Burr said he was waiting for the comedic equivalent of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” to swoop in and flush comedy nerds from existence. But in reality, the alt-comedy scene was the equivalent of grunge. By the early 1990s, young comedians (David Cross, Marc Maron, Bob Odenkirk, Janeane Garofalo), like their counterparts in music, felt frustrated by the mainstream. They started producing their own shows and doing more subjective, self-referential material in newly formed alternative rooms and shows like Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles, “Cross Comedy” nights at Catch a Rising Star in Cambridge, Mass., the Rivoli in Toronto and the Luna Lounge in New York. While club comedy had drink minimums and was confrontational and crowd-focused (many of those in the alternative scene also considered it homophobic, racist and reactionary, with good reason), the alternative scene prided itself on being autobiographical, quirky and tied much more closely to sketch comedy and character work. It didn’t pay well, but that was the point. Comics sacrificed money for freedom.