Brexit and Trump now loom over culturally engaged comedy, where behind-the-curve jokes can be easily exposed. Stewart Lee – just as his wife, Bridget Christie, did in Edinburgh this year – begins by complaining that his new show, Content Provider, has been derailed by the EU vote. The original idea was to explore, with reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, atomised man in the era of digital consumerism. Which Lee duly does, but the concept feels diluted now – rendered peripheral, indeed – by his material on 2016’s two great political cataclysms, which kickstarts each act.

The concept is muddied then, but there remains a great deal in Content Provider to enjoy. After the axing of BBC2’s Comedy Vehicle, Lee is no longer compelled to frame his live work as a dummy run for the TV show, and he can focus on delivering excellent live standup. Tonight’s offering fits the bill, as the almost 50-year-old “ex-TV comic” purports to reassess his place in the world. “I’m coming to despise the character of Stewart Lee,” he tells us at one point, and there are intriguing hints that, for once, that utterance might contain a shred of the truth. Not to begin with, though. Lee’s opening Brexit routine pitches us into trademark Stewart Lee territory, as he double bluffs his scorn for Leave voters and questions his own role within “the metropolitan liberal elite”. (On which pertinent subject, it would be fascinating to hear more.) A new UK landscape comes into being, he tells us: one great Tolkien wasteland studded with walled citadels where “wizards, poets and people who understand data” live. As ever, Lee oozes superiority, whether quoting his own newspaper columns (“I believe it was I who once said …”) or mocking the BBC’s remake of out-of-time sitcom Are You Being Served? By this stage, he’s back on track with the original show, bemoaning his fall from TV grace, reduced, in one pleasingly beady routine, to buying his own DVDs online and selling them on at a paltry profit. The second half unfolds Lee’s most concentrated setpiece, a characteristically twisty routine about bondage practices in years gone by. On one level, it’s a rude joke about our grandparents’ generation improvising DIY S&M. On multiple others, it’s mocking Lee’s hated under-40s, to whom everything – even kinky sex – comes easily packaged as just another meaningless artefact in the consumerist marketplace. This argument climaxes in a broadside against generational narcissism that, by Lee’s standards, seems unusually straightforward. At such moments – and assuming no irony is intended in the famously navel-gazing Lee critiquing self-absorption – the dense archness of “the character of Stewart Lee” dilutes. At others, it persists, but more cosily than in the past, as a game we all – Lee and his audience – enjoy playing together. It’s certainly enjoyable tonight. Lee is at ease, having fun, totally in control of his complex, supercilious/resentful register. But, as a satisfying visual gag brings his lament for the selfie generation to its conclusion, the sense lingers that Brexit and Trump (and his material on them) have devalued the currency of Lee’s original concept. We’re left with a show that pulls in different directions. But if its parts are ill-fitting, they’re also frequently brilliant.