It feels quite empowering to leave a Stewart Lee gig at the first available opportunity. Lee’s latest live outing, running at Leicester Square Theatre and essentially trialling material ahead of recordings for the new series of his BBC show (Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle) is called Much A-Stew About Nothing.

On Friday night, he was getting much Stewed up about his lacklustre audience, swiftly discerning that “a lot of you are not my crowd”. Despite explaining early on that he had no interest in warming us up, and just wanted to push through the 30-minute sets, the first half-hour or so was beset by his own interruptions, as he took issue with our wrong-headed laughs, our lack of responsiveness, our failure to “make connections” and our want of imagination in coming up with suggestions when asked to do so.

Having started off with a theatre full of reasonably cheerful, appreciative punters – most of whom looked intelligent enough to me (what was he expecting, the sort of people who attend a TED conference?), Lee stoked an atmosphere of tension and unease. There were early laughs at the expense of that Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman Newsnight interview (hardly Frost/Nixon… “more like a monkey throwing his own excrement against a foghorn”) but the contempt he expressed for Brand seemed as nothing to the disdain he showed towards those who’d paid to see him. “I am not interested in what you think,” he advised, suddenly. “Nothing you do tonight will make any difference.”
He continued in a patronising vein: “A lot of the things you hear tonight will relate to things that exist in the real world.” What were we? He spelt it out with the c-word: “Stupid Friday night ****s”.

For some reason – too tired, too polite, too squiffy, too adoring? – the capacity crowd didn’t mutiny at this sardonic onslaught, just took it on the chin, in some cases lapped up the abuse with an agreeable chortle. Was the invective all part of Lee’s uncommon cleverness – a wind-up strategy that allows him to deconstruct his material as he goes along, thereby embellishing it further? Plainly his refusal to suffer perceived fools gladly is of a piece with his high-risk determination not to be crudely “pleasing” but even so the joke wears thin.
During the Edinburgh Fringe, I turned up to see him perform at the Stand in character as “Baconface” but he abandoned the gig within about five minutes – our fault, apparently, not his. It’s as though the audience are there for his delectation, not the other way round. In comedy, sometimes a room will turn on a comedian; Lee reverses that dynamic.

Come the interval, I decided to take him at his word. Why stay on and risk letting him down further? Besides which, Lee had made it abundantly clear by this point that he didn’t even want a Telegraph review. He wouldn’t want any Telegraph readers in, he scoffed in disgust, as he vented on the subject of Michael Deacon (“an idiot”, apparently) whom he accuses of having plagiarised his parody of Dan Brown (as if The Da Vinci Code wasn’t an open invitation to parodists everywhere). Like a one-man National Security Agency, he monitors Deacon’s late-night Tweets to pick up references to himself.

Doubtless this piece by me will show up on his Google alerts, or however he keeps up with the ever-fascinating subject of how he’s perceived by others. Maybe I’ll get the honour of being mercilessly dissected online or on-stage. You know what? I don’t give a stuff. If Lee had a shred of interest or insight into the working lives of other people, he’d realise that those who give up an evening at the end of a week to see him deserve his thanks not his toxic scorn.