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From the beginning, I wanted comedy to be taken seriously.

It was 1976, and I had just started Yuk Yuks in the basement of a Toronto community centre. The stand-up we were doing was wild and uncensored, maybe at times ridiculous, but I never thought of it as silly or ephemeral. As many times as I grabbed my crotch and insulted the fat guy in the front row, I still saw some gravitas in the whole bizarre venture.

And why not? Comedy is as much a cultural statement as pop music or TV drama or what passes for theatre these days. In fact, standup comedy, without all the messy plot and character, may be a better record of the way we think and feel than a lot of so-called “high art.”

Meanwhile, most of the comedy writers in the media have lost their columns over the past decade. It's almost impossible to find anyone who files a continuous comedy critique in this country any more. Editors have told me it's an issue of demographics: The comedy audience doesn't read much; the much smaller jazz audience does.

The Yuk Yuk's Guide To Canadian Stand-up, by Mark Breslin, audio book, Canada Audio, $34.99

And this in a country that has produced so much of the world's great comedy over the last 30 years. Do I even need to list the names? The SCTV gang, The Kids In the Hall, Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel, Seth Rogen, Russell Peters, Norm MacDonald, and you can finish the list with another 40 names.

Why are Canadians so darn funny? If comedy is the province of the outsider, we fill the bill admirably. Noses pressed against the glass of American culture, we see it but are not part of it. So we can comment on it from a close but comfortable distance.

And we have institutions that support comedy, ensuring that comics are well-prepared by the time they're ready to take their work global – Yuk Yuks, of course, but also Just for Laughs, the Humber School of Comedy, the Comedy Network, XM's Laugh Attack channel, and, intermittently, the CBC. No other country has that kind of infrastructure of support for young comics.

“ You could see recent Canadian history mirrored in the seemingly innocent routines of people yammering in front of a brick wall ”

When I first got into the business, I vowed I would keep two things in comedy that had been (and still are) weeded out – sex and anger. I always saw standup in Freudian terms, a way of telling the truth in a society that must repress it. Perhaps that's why a third of my audience would storm out nightly when I opened up my first club in 1976. “Good,” I thought, “ the comics are hitting the nerve.” Now, decades later, no one walks out. The culture has caught up with us, and cable TV prepares the audience for an evening of libertine, if not libertarian, ripostes.

As I began collecting the comics' routines that would become the spine of my audio book, I started to see the patterns that told a story that was bigger than Canadian comedy; it was about Canada itself. The tension between city and country. The rise of multiculturalism. Gender identity and politics. The new vernacular. If you arranged the comics' cuts just so, you could see recent Canadian history mirrored in the seemingly innocent routines of people yammering in front of a brick wall.

Writing about comedy is a different process than writing comedy. When you write comedy, your brain needs to run free, able to make connections that would not pass through the logic filter of everyday life. Your mind has to mimic the thought processes of the insane; not A-B-C-D, but A-B-orange-FISH! Every joke turns a corner at the punchline.

Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, once said that if you analyze comedy you risk killing it. And that's the difficulty in writing about comedy – how to capture the freewheeling spirit of the comic without suffocating his ideas. Comedy is a kind of sexualized psychedelic; the routines are a dreamscape where ideas exist for the pure pleasure of release. The jokes themselves are almost sexual – the slow build, the moment of gratification, and the disappointment that it's all over too soon. So don't feel too superior to those stand-ups you see in their plaid Gap shirts and ironic tees. They may look like a bunch of nerds, but at least they're getting off regularly.

They're also therapists. When I tire of watching comics onstage, I watch the audience members. I watch their expressions lighten. I watch their brows smooth over. As they laugh I can see their stomach muscles ripple and contort. When they leave the show they all seem two inches taller.

So sure, stand-up comedy can often seem puerile and forced. But I can't help thinking as I've listened to it over the past three decades that it can also be something much, much more.

Mark Breslin founded the Yuk Yuk's chain of comedy clubs. His new audio book is The Yuk Yuk's Guide to Canadian Stand-Up.