In the height of his fame, Dane Cook articulated a theory that all comedians really want to be rockstars and that all rockstars actually wish they were comedians. There’s definitely something to it. The drive to express ourselves to an audience, to be validated for our feelings and virtuosity of the craft is something shared by both disciplines.

I’m lucky enough to have been a performing musician as well as a stand up comic and I see parallels. My own reflection is that comedy is scarier, but that’s mostly because you’re alone up there. You don’t have bandmates, an instrument, loud noise or a light show to hide behind. It’s more stripped down, and what you’re performing is more personal. Even if you don’t disclose anything about your inner self, you’re sharing your sense of humour and it hurts to be judged more for than that for your music tastes.

My own theory is that, while arena-filling comedians like Kevin Hart and Bert Kreischer might be fulfilling fantasies of stadium rock acts, the heart and intent of stand-up is closer to punk than rock.

I’m too young to have caught the first wave of the punk movement. My parents’ excellent record collection reflected the experimental and socially adventurous sixties and seventies, and my own record collection as a teenager mostly consisted of post-punk music: The Cure, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, that sort of thing.

Punk’s essential listening slipped right into that 6 year gap between where my parent’s music ended and mine started. I knew about it, but I hadn’t caught the initial buzz and the bands weren’t on my radar.

Not, at least, until I found myself in a punk-influenced high school garage band with a singer who was keen to school me on it. He gave me a stack of vinyl to listen to: The Stooges, Dead Kennedys. The Clash, Subhumans, Buzzcocks, Crass, Sex Pistols, and so on.

I’ll confess I didn’t love all of it but I instantly embraced The Clash and The Damned and still love them both. But even the stuff I didn’t warm to inspired me. At the time, the music of the New Romantic movement was huge, and everything was carefully curated and polished.

The music was produced with the most sophisticated available engineering technology and knowledge. Even the haircuts and makeup were painstakingly planned and presented. And then punk just cut through all that with raw energy. It was brash and loud and didn’t give a fuck whether it complied with anyone’s dress code.

It was uninterested in virtuosity and sophisticated production. These records sounded like they were recorded in people’s garages because in many cases, they literally were.

And that was the point… Home recording. The spirit of do-it-yourself. Not waiting around for a benevolent golden ticket from the mainstream music industry to make a glossy overproduced album destined for coffee tables.

Punk knew that what was relevant was happening on the streets, executed by people who didn’t care what the industry was selling. If you knew, you knew, and the coolest stuff was photocopied music zines, and self-taught musicians on cheap borrowed instruments down in the actual streets.

By the time the industry found out, it would be too late. If the industry did, they’d polish all of the energy and relevance out of it anyway. The cool shit, the exciting stuff, was literally self-produced and self-published on nonexistent budgets.

Side note: This was the mind-set I had when I joined my first “real” band after school, and it didn’t go over well with my bandmates. They had virtuosity and a production aesthetic that I felt was bourgeois and boring, while they viewed my energy and complete lack of ability to play an instrument as immature and worthless. We were, of course, both right. We made each other feel like shit about our respective shortcomings for years to come. But I digress…

The thing about punk, and my disclaimer is that there are countless online arguments about what is and isn’t punk, is that do-it-yourself thing. Yes, it’s about challenging and defying institutions, but it’s also about not relying on those institutions’ benevolence to bestow recording contracts on us either.

Don’t wait for qualifications, or a green light or a letter of acceptance. Just fucking do it. And if people think it’s not polished enough for their palates, fuck ’em. They’re not our people. You get it or you don’t, and if you don’t you might be part of the problem we want to challenge.

Damn, I wish I’d retained more of this thinking. Or at least that I’d kept it in mind when I thought about stand-up comedy.

I aspired to comedy for the longest time. I’m talking decades. I foolishly imagined that there were barriers to entry, that you needed the right background (drama, acting or media), special credentials, special contacts or some kind of expensive course.

Nope. You can literally volunteer to have speak at an open mic, and they’ll usually be pleased to give you a go. I suspect the resentment I sometimes feel when a truly awful first-timer is drunkenly slurring nothing in particular to an increasingly impatient audience is probably grounded in a secret jealousy that they knew they could just do it, that they just did it while I stupidly spent years hoping for some kind of permission to come from fuck-knows-where.

The punk aesthetic is the beauty of stand-up. You can just do it, and anywhere. You don’t need an expensive studio or fancy production. Eddie Izzard literally performed on street corners with a busker’s license. Last month I did a gig where the PA failed but it was a small room and we just spoke with our small audience.

No stage, no sound system, no light show or roadies. Just raw and real stripped down energy.

And, of course, comedy’s job is to challenge institutions and assumptions that everyone takes for granted – just as punk does. So before you tell me you’re offended by a joke, ask yourself whether you’d waste your breath trying to make a punk band repent because you told them you’re personally offended by what they did or said.

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Just as our modern sensibilities find it difficult to imagine a world where everyone wasn’t raised as clever and woke as we are, it’s also difficult to picture a world in which comedians regularly face prison time for uttering rude words on stage. But it happened. If fucking happened. It happened in my lifetime.

Our free speech all resulted from the risks and sacrifices made by comedians like Lenny Bruce, who literally raised a middle finger at authority and institution. Lenny Bruce was punk before punk was punk.

Like all art, corporate institutions try to co-opt anything relevant or meaningful. It’s true of music and it’s true of comedy. Even after Lenny Bruce pioneered a free-speech driven form of stand-up, the “industry” still imposed a chokehold of career progression through their network of clubs feeding into night-time television shows.

Controlling comedy club owners like Mitzi Shore TV gatekeepers like Johnny Carson (who never let female comedians on his show) decided who and what was going to be spoon-fed to the public, after it was shaped and refined by them, of course.

At the beginning of the nineties, Janeane Garafolo and Dana Gould found it hard to play by those rules. They and a bunch of other talented comics had tried to win the favour of the industry, but it was time to do it themselves. The started their own comedy show in a book shop, and were joined by others like Patton Oswalt and Eugene Mirman.

It exploded. Comedy shows outside of comedy clubs. Comedy performances that defied the strict style prescriptions that were imposed by the industry. Suddenly anything was possible. Everyone called this phenomenon “Alt Comedy” but make no mistake – it was very, very punk.

It was also the reason we can do it today. You can start your own comedy event. You can do your own thing. You can talk about whatever you want. We talk about these things like they’ve always been aspects of stand-up comedy, but it’s not the case. All of these freedoms, all the possibilities of the platforms, have been been massive achievements fought for by punks.