By his own confession at the start, Stewart Lee said: “I haven’t done this show for three months, which is the longest I’ve ever had off doing stand-up apart from the four years when I was too in debt to perform, so I might forget some of it.

“You won’t notice, you’ll think,’That’s clever, he’s done that on purpose to critique his own act’, but I actually may genuinely not know what’s going on.”

Lee had originally wanted to write the show around a 19th-century painting.

“It was going to be the idea of an individual in a digitised free-market society based around an image of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog.

“But then Brexit happened… and, as I don’t know how Brexit’s going to pan out, I can’t write anything about it, in case it goes out of fashion or out of date and I can’t use the bit for the full 18 months of the show and monetise the work I’ve done.”

Which was a bit of a red herring, since he spent a good deal of the first half of his Content Provider show talking about, or alluding, to Brexit.

“I’ve done this show all over, Brexit-voting places, non-Brexit-voting places, this was marginally in favour of Remain, here in Oxford town. But the Remain-voting cities loom out of the map now, don’t they… like fantasy citadels, Tolkienesque landscapes, wondrous walled cities full of wizards and poets… people who can understand data… in the middle of a massed swampy wilderness, with ‘Here there be trolls’ written…”

And his problem with writing about the divisive nature of Brexit was summed up when he said: “Oxford, Monday night, round of applause; next night, Lincoln, glassed in the face.”

Observations on David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Gary Lineker, Russell Howard, Donald Trump, bendy bananas, vegetable spiralisers and the under-40s had the sold-out audience roaring with laughter.

Typical of his scathing humour was one on Boris Johnson.

“I guarantee you at some point he will be leader of the Tory Party.

“Theresa May has been put in place as a palate cleanser, a nasty mouthwash you swill around your gums before you’re forced to eat actual human s***.”

Or his take on Michael Gove and wife Sarah Vine.

“Michael Gove and Sarah Vine disappeared for a while, but now they’re back, trying to reinvent themselves as the amusing, celebrity political couple for young millennials so jaded they no longer find Neil and Christine Hamilton quite sickening enough.”

As is his wont, Lee berated his audience for being too slow on the uptake on a particular joke or witticism and then deconstructed it – using an imaginary triangular diagram – to explain the audience’s shortcomings. The hilarity is all in his mockingly exasperated delivery.

He pointed at two empty seats in one of the front rows and explained they had been sold, but probably to touts.

“All these seats are sold out,” he said. “But that’s my dream… to perform to an entirely empty sold out theatre, which will eliminate the problem all live art has to face, which is the public’s inability to appreciate what is happening.”

Bemoaning the BBC’s decision to cancel his BAFTA-award-winning BBC2 series, despite it being “unprecedentedly critically acclaimed whilst also being incredibly cheap to make”, he added: “I notice there is money at the BBC for a proposed remake of Are You Being Served.

“The irony of remaking Are You Being Served is that the British retail industry no longer exists. The new Are You Being Served should be set in an Amazon delivery warehouse Mrs Slocombe stands in a massive shed off the M6 and makes incomprehensible cat-based double entendres about her own v***** to poorly paid and soon-to-be-deported East European workers.”

Lee raged when he saw a chap on his mobile, but, to be fair, he had warned the audience not to use their phones during the show.

However, he still got some laughs out of the situation, even pretending that it could have taken his high blood pressure over the top.

“If I see that again, I’ll come down and smash it. ‘I saw Stewart Lee’s last gig’. ‘What was it like?’ Well, he had a bloke on his phone actually, wasn’t really paying attention, then he lost his temper and never really recovered.’

Don’t do it again or I’ll come and get it – I’ve done it before.

“In fact, I did it during a recording of the last TV show and they had to hush it all up. They were worried because it was around the time that Clarkson hit that bloke, they didn’t want another scandal. I had to go and see the two head blokes. If it got into the press, I’d admit that I’d done it and I would never appear on TV again…as it happens, they cancelled the show anyway.”

After two hours of genuinely hilarious humour, his closing moment was a clever pastiche of the Friedrich painting, with a pointed dig at the selfie generation.

And the smiling members of the audience were still buzzing long after Lee, a comic genius sorely missed from our TV screens, had left the stage to sign merchandise and meet the fans.

And, despite the Beeb losing its senses in not recommissioning another series, he reassuringly told me: “Don’t worry, this show will come out on DVD somehow.”