“Nobody is equipped to review me,” says Stewart Lee towards the end of his two-hour set at Newcastle City Hall.

He means intellectually and, of course, he’s joking – but I’m inclined to agree with him.

This is a stand-up so skilled in deconstructing the art form he’s performing while performing it – and crucially, still being funny at the same time – that it’s difficult to describe the experience of watching him live.

You really do have to be there, because his relationship with the audience is key to the way the whole performance hangs together.

I don’t mean audience participation in a “what’s your name and where do you come from?” sense – rather, that this is a masterclass in manipulating an audience’s reaction to different types of comedy.

From the off, he’s relentlessly funny on the subject of people walking in and out – and there did seem to be a lot of this tonight, made particularly vexing in the City Hall by the bright foyer lights which flood the auditorium every time the doors open.

The audience’s apparent lack of concentration, and willingness to commit to the intellectual rigour of following a Stewart Lee gig, are the only constants in a show without a theme, consisting as it does of four separate segments which will ultimately form episodes of the next BBC series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

The audience comments feel improvised and seem, for a time, born of genuine frustration – and then, just before the interval, he weaves what appears to be mounting frustration into a superb set piece that shows just how much he has this close-to-full City Hall in the palm of his hand.

I love clever, and this is spellbindingly, brilliantly clever. It leaves me a little bit in awe of him, even as a card-carrying Lee veteran in possession of all his DVDs and a seat in the middle of the swathe of audience he praises as his core following, the “liberal intelligentsia of Newcastle”.

Tonight’s show didn’t quite have the pace I’ve seen him deliver before – the second half, in particular, is relaxed and he admits it’s less finessed than the polished half-hour segments which make up the first half. The TV series for which this tour is developing material won’t record until winter, so there’s time to smooth any rough edges.

However, there are super moments when he overlays surreal silliness on top of all that cleverness.

During the first segment, which applies the concept of populist observational comedy to religion, there’s a ludicrous bit about Quakers which built up almost imperceptibly until I realised I had tears in my eyes, at which moment Lee achieved an impressive 100% success rate at making me laugh to this point all three times I’ve watched him live. I love clever, but I love funny even more and when I go to watch stand-up this is the holy grail.

The segments after the interval aren’t perfect – some of it works, some of it doesn’t quite – but he weaves rewarding moments into what seems, at face value, to be a narrative about a cat named “Paul Nuttalls from UKIP” but is, of course, much more than that, at least for the audience members listening and not going in and out of the theatre as if this were a nightclub.

See? I told you – and so did he – that I wasn’t equipped to review him. You really do need to see him for yourself.