The standup’s two-part set is, as ever, a rarefied viewing experience. You can take nothing at face value as he plays cat and mouse with the audience

Stewart Lee recently defended comedy against the Nigel Farage charge that it’s in hock to left-liberal values. Now he’s out to disprove (not for the first time) the Daily Mail’s barb that comics fight shy of attacking Islam. “Having a go at the Islams” supposedly forms the first half hour of Lee’s current two-part set – again billed as a try-out for his TV show rather than a theatre event in its own right. There’s still plenty to delight those who prefer watching him live: Lee’s on tricksy, antagonistic form here. “Islams” are largely spared, but the rest of us – critics, the audience, squeamish liberals like Lee himself – spend most of these 75 minutes in the line of fire.

There’s an enjoyable frisson to the first half, as Lee sets out to create a mass-appeal, Islamophobic observational routine, “to get the Daily Mail off my back”. To some degree, that situates Lee in his comfort zone, in that it licenses more cheap (but still funny) shots at mainstream standup.

But it also floats an interesting possibility, given that Lee’s most celebrated show, 90s Comedian, featured a famously no-holds-barred attack on evangelist Christianity. His main aim here is to mock the rightwing impulse to simplify and demonise Islam. But there are moments too when Lee allows us to think he might rise to, as well as ridicule, the Mail’s challenge.

He chooses not to, of course, but has devious fun along the way. There’s a choice send-up of the various ways the UK press react to clash-of-civilisation flashpoints, and a lovely, throwaway aside – skewering the inanities of racist discourse – about a Sikh man on a bus who refuses to gift Lee a punchline.

The second half is ostensibly about urine – it being a noble experiment, Lee says, to fashion 30 minutes of comedy out of piss alone. It begins with five-year-old Lee being bullied in the school toilets, and later finds him accidentally peeing on his granddad’s face. From that incident, Lee derives a droll variant on the phrase “water off a duck’s back”, which he then deploys – with trademark dolorous repetition – throughout the rest of the show.

It is, as ever, a rarefied viewing experience. You can take nothing at face value, and inverted commas swarm like bees around everything Lee says. Some may crave a moment’s relaxation of the rules of his cat-and-mouse game with the audience. But it remains the case that working out what he’s up to, and why, is part of the fun of Lee’s comedy.

Tonight’s most choice example – a deadpan piss-take of tears-of-a-clown cliches – comes when Lee feigns bitter disappointment at the reception of one joke. What starts as pique at the audience’s ignorance accumulates, increment by increment, into a baroque vision in which under-appreciated Lee is flanked onstage by the ghosts of suicidal comedians through the ages, chanting “join us! Join us!”

This isn’t peak Lee: it’s two short, rough-cut sets in which nothing has much time to develop. But it’s still a rich evening of comedy. The material’s always surprising, there are no longueurs, and Lee’s performance in the role of the arrogant, thin-skinned and manipulative host is more skilful and playful than ever.