Before Stewart Lee starts his three hour set he issues a warning to any mobile phone users: if he sees anyone taking photos or texting he will “smash the phone with the microphone stand, then wank on it, and then take it to the backstage toilets and shit on it too”. He needn’t bother, though. He’s playing a home crowd; there’s no danger anyone’s going to miss a word.

In many ways a three-hour Stewart Lee gig at the Royal Festival Hall is a middle class comedy fan’s cummy sleep-wank heaven. This was not lost on Lee. He attacked the venue’s patrons immediately, calling the audience at the Southbank Centre “Guardian reading cunts”. It was the first in a long line of many shrewd, apt and hilarious put downs throughout the night. Looking slimmer of waist and less red of face, he looked healthy, seeming to move with more energy across the tastefully lit, bare stage.

My concerns about the RFH being too large for Stew’s muttered performances were unfounded. As much as he’d like you to think he doesn’t know how to do a huge room he does – the 2,500 seat venue quaked with laughter throughout, the jokes travelling from front to back. He employed a tactic familiar to his fans, dividing the room up based on how skilled, liberal and discerning they were. I was on the slow side of the room (the majority) and he expertly played to those seated behind him, turning them into High Command coven of Stewart Lee elites.

He seemed a man utterly relaxed within his craft. Stew, who I do not know well enough to address with such informality, played throughout the night with the crowd’s expectations.

A joke about your inner-tabloid-voice became an extended schizophrenic running gag; sabotaging his measured and reasonable diagnoses of a world besieged by bigoted rhetoric. That interplay of high-concept satire blended with the straight faced social justice makes the jokes hit harder. I am fully aware how glib that all sounds, but it’s his playfulness and great sense of the mood in the room that make it all hang together, seemingly effortlessly.

Politics was the order of the day in this set, although other comedians were the main victims of his painful liberal mastication. It’s something a number of my friends criticise Stew for, the smugness of his character being a thin mask for his genuine Oxbridge pseudery. That and his unrestrained bashing of other acts he’s deemed unworthy.

Personally it’s always been one of my favourite parts of his style; the faux-outrage at the insouciance of an audience failing to recognise his genius. He swept the laughable and tubby James Corden away in a single pithy line, describing the mere idea of his fandom “like a dog listening to classical music”.

These jokes wouldn’t work if you didn’t think that some small part of Stew believed in it. Flawless delivery and a tight performance aid this too, although they are almost to be expected at this point. Putting aside his talent as a performer, it’s the mercurial cross-roads where the real Stewart Lee meets the character that is the most interesting. He must be a bit of a mean genius, surely? Maybe I’m falling into his trap.

Stew seems more comfortable in his fame, too. His acute awareness of the respect and admiration other comics hold for him was underscored with the dismissal of his comedy critics “They’re obsessed with me, the young comics. ‘I hate Stewart Lee, I’ve seen him 800 times.’”

He was never too self-satisfied though, a mistake many good comics have made.  In recent years Eddie Izzard has looked like he is high on the stink of his own schtick. Jimmy Carr too, his pretend laugh replete with an erroneous assurance that he is “bloody funny ya know”.

It felt good to see that Stew has never stopped embracing the struggle – and it’s that crackle that makes comedy exciting and dangerous. That’s why he divides and taunts the audience so much throughout, because he has to have something to kick back against.

Still, I did feel that three hours is too much of one comedian for me. It’s an audacious idea – a performance of the six half-hour sets that will make up the next series of Comedy Vehicle. Even so, they’re always quite meaty topics and I did feel some fatigue towards the end, most likely caused by lack of time for digestion. If this was the length of a full show it would veer into masturbatory self-indulgence.

Having seen A Room With A Stew in January last year, I was half expecting to be bored as he talked his way down a well-travelled road. I was proved wrong on this count, much to my satisfaction.

Almost an hour of what I had seen at that preview show had been removed, and another twenty minutes expanded upon and changed. In a world where Jerry Seinfeld feels comfortable stating that he gets rid of only 10 percent of his old material each year.

Casting aside a full hour of material becomes a medallion of artistic integrity round Stewart Lee’s neck. The show would have been great with those bits in (they were my favourite part of the earlier performances), but obviously Stew is neither short of material or afraid of self-editing. I hope that little known fact is with people when they watch the program later this year – he chucked two episodes worth, for us!

As always though, the most interesting parts of any Stewart Lee show are the deconstructions, and it’s these points where his genius, yes genius really shows.It is oft-said and for that reason loses its impact, but Stewart Lee is a much better class of comedian than the TV viewing public are ever exposed to. Given the BBC’s shamefully passé taste of late (Mrs Brown’s Boys), it is a small miracle something unashamedly cerebral has made it onto the box at all.

His preoccupation with form is comparable only to the innovations of the jazz pioneers and visionaries that play throughout the intervals of the show. He is so adept at pulling apart the fabric of his comedy, breaking and folding, repeating and cultivating seat-twisting tension. It is jazz-comedy in a very pure, experimental way.

“Miles Davis has arrived”, it’s true, and he said it himself.

Glutton for punishment: Stew’s doing it all over again in March.