Stewart Lee brought his latest show to the Oxford Playhouse for a run of six shows all week –  ending tonight, Saturday February 8.

It’s one of his favourite venues and often proves to be a pivotal moment in his tour.

“I have a very good relationship with the Playhouse, I’m a patron of it, and I really like the staff there,” says Lee, whose TV show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle won a BAFTA and two British Comedy Awards.

“Shows get better in those kinds of rooms. It’s a smaller room than I’d normally play which is why I end up doing it for a week,” he adds. “You can hear people, you can improvise more.

“You come out of that room having done a good week’s work that helps bolster the show for when you get into slightly less playable rooms where you can’t get the vibe going like you can at the Playhouse.

“The show will come out from there in a much better state to how it goes in.”

The show, Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf, explores the ‘wave of callous Netflix-endorsed comedy of anger, monetising the denigration of minorities for millions of dollars’.

It sees the comedian transform into a ‘tough-talking werewolf comedian from the dark forests of the subconscious who hates humanity’ who challenges Lee himself to silence the beast ‘with the silver bullet of his unprecedentedly critically acclaimed style of stand-up’.

But how is the former Oxford University student, who shot to fame alongside his comedy partner Richard Herring in shows such as Fist of Fun, planning to keep himself entertained when he’s not entertaining audiences?

“I’ll go around the art galleries, I’ll go and look at some nice churches, I’ll go out and do some walks, go on Port Meadow, so it’s a great place to be for a week,” he says. “It’s a beautiful city, and it’s a great venue to play.

“The surrounding countryside around Oxford is where we used to go out from the south of Birmingham as kids,” the former Solihull School pupils recalls.

“Also, I was a student there in the 1980s. I have fond memories of it now – immediately after being a student I struggled to reconcile that time with life, but I do like going back there.

“Some journalists took me out to the Rollright Stones last time, which was nice as well.”

Indeed we did, with the Oxford Mail answering Lee’s request for a lift to the ancient site near Chipping Norton.

And it’s a location that continues to fascinate the comedian, columnist and documentary maker.

“I was down there on New Year’s Eve as well,” he says.

“I went to a hut near Chipping Norton on my own and had a really great time! I love that part of the world, the countryside’s brilliant.”

He has also paid a visit to his old college, St Edmund Hall.

“I see my old tutors. Two of them I always meet up with, which is great.

“I do a student workshop for people want to talk about comedy writing or whatever.”

Much of his work is about exploring the comedy-making process itself.

So has he ever considered a role in academia? Visiting professor of comedy, perhaps?

“Sometimes,” he says. “But if I take on a commitment, I like to know that I’ll be able to do it properly, and I tend to be on the road a lot.

“I’m patron of all sorts of odd things like the Philip Larkin Society, the Blake one, I’m involved in lots of things like that. I’m an honorary follow of Oxford but I’m basically casting around for things they might want me to do. I think I can get a free parking space for a limited time out of it!”

Despite his side projects, which have included rewriting the Porter’s scene in Macbeth for the RSC and interviewing alternative rock legends Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Steve Albini of Big Black, comedy remains his passion.

“One of the things that’s great about stand-up is that it’s a mainstream genre that people think they like,” he says. “Within that, it’s extremely flexible.

“You can bring in things from the avant garde and from the experimental and political satire, you can bring in narrative and all sorts of things that people don’t necessarily think are in stand-up.

“Then your audience in Derby, or Crewe, Aberdeen or wherever, they go home and they think ‘oh that was good, I like stand-up’. But with me they’ll also have seen a story, a bit of pretentious free jazz wordless vocal, some kind of narrative subtext, all kinds of things that I chuck into it and they find themselves enjoying them.

“Whereas if you said to them ‘come to an evening of dense political satire which includes a 10-minute section with no words and a man pretending to have a mental breakdown’ they’ll go ‘oh, I don’t like the sound of that’.

“I think increasingly that’s what we’re going to have to do because in the arts generally as the funding has been chopped off at the legs, people aren’t being able to study it – it’s like the Dark Ages are coming back and we the comedians are like Lindisfarne.

“When I say Lindisfarne I mean the monastery, not the band! I’m thinking of the Dark Ages monks inscribing a manuscript while the average person thinks ‘What? The Fog on the Tyne blokes?’.

“The arts have got to try to preserve their skills and interests and knowledge in the face of these barbaric attempts to dismantle it on a global and national level and one of the Trojan horses for that is comedy because people think they like it and so they go.”