A Room With a Stew certainly isn’t a show for anyone who thinks that they themselves couldn’t spend an hour Googling “commonly mistaken song lyrics” and still come up with a better live show than Peter Kay has managed in the last two decades. You have to concentrate to keep up with Stewart Lee, and it’s quite hard work, but worth the effort because it just about represents the perfection of laughter if you do.

Having seen Stewart Lee many times before, and indeed even a work-in-progress part of this very show at the Leicester Square Theatre a few months back, it’s fascinating to see the extent to which the detail of the performance is crafted with the rest of the show in mind. Like watching Shutter Island or The Sixth Sense for a second time, little, apparently insignificant moments can become the whole point of a 20 minute tirade. He plants seeds, builds on some of them, weaves them with others, tells you what he’s going to do while he’s doing it, then shows you how he did it and why you shouldn’t have laughed at that bit because the other bit was of more artistic merit.

Stewart Lee is sharp, abundantly experienced and knows his comedy through and through. He knows every trick in the book, a fair few of which he’s invented himself. He hates jokes (“Oooh look, I’ve said one thing then revealed another thing, concealing the first thing with language“) and whenever his material momentarily dips into anything resembling a traditional joke (which is always, nevertheless, very funny) it’s done as a parody of a lesser form of comedy. Lee’s character is offended by our laughter, and immediately rips into his audience as if the only reason he’d told us such a basic joke was to trap us into revealing our forbidden love for Michael McIntyre.

Of course, this is all just an act. A deranged, unhinged, hilarious character but one that wouldn’t work unless played to perfection. And wouldn’t work unless the point was a fair one. There’s enough justifiable and real contempt for his subject matter that it is believable at first. The point at which the character becomes so absurd that the penny finally drops is different for everyone, leading to a form of staggered laughter that is entirely peculiar to a Stewart Lee audience.

He’s prepared to take this uncomfortable atmosphere to extraordinary lengths in order to fit his purposes; deliberately sabotaging his own show by stamping on what purposefully little flow and rapport he’s created, merely for the purposes of setting up an angry change in pace and some silent tension to build to an even more twistedly hilarious nervous breakdown act just before the interval.

It’s going to be on telly soon so I won’t ruin it. It looks almost accidental. It isn’t. Its genius, and you can’t help but admire the confidence of a performance artist who is prepared to serially self-sabotage his show in the present for a punch-line some 15 minutes later. This is confrontational, uncomfortable, angry comedy of the very highest order and there’s no one else doing anything like it on the planet.

The second part of the show is much more gentle and friendly, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether that was because he was nursing the intracranial haemorrhage he must have sustained before the interval.

Stewart Lee will go down in history, defiantly not for selling out two live shows a year at the O2 (which he could easily do if his vast audience were prepared to watch him rip them off from 300 metres away), but for grafting away for years, crafting something that pushes boundaries like comedy is supposed to. And quite frankly, if that’s your job, why on earth would you do anything else? Please do go and catch him at his prime. I can’t recommend this show enough.