In the opening minutes of his new show Stewart Lee frets, with his customary potent mixture of truth and artifice, that there’s a critic in the theatre and the jokes are already going down worse than last night. He needn’t start worrying – and I’m quite sure that he isn’t really. I don’t think there has ever been a comedian more at ease with the vagaries of audience reaction, more attuned to the slightest shift in the intensity of laughter, and more adept at identifying it and turning it to his advantage. In his earlier years he sometimes consciously set out to stop audiences laughing as much as possible during his routines. As a comedian, when you’ve invited death into your home, it no longer holds any power over you.

I have been watching Stew from his earliest days, and there was no danger tonight of him looking bad in front of ‘the critic’. I can recall pissing myself with laughter at a tiny gig of his in Manchester in 1988, when no one else in the audience, not a single person, produced even the faintest titter. I felt so embarrassed that I was actually clamping my hand over my mouth and trying to keep myself quiet so as not to look like a total nutter. Stew turned on me the full force of his comic charisma, and told me to ‘let it out’. Now, almost forty years later, it’s good to be in the company of five hundred other people who all get it.

And you need to get it. Because Stew isn’t going to give it to you. He never has and he never will. Part of his genius, his uniqueness in the pantheon of great stand-ups, where he is fated always to be simultaneously an outsider and the greatest of all time, is that he has never compromised. Not a millimetre.

The downside, I guess, is that he’ll never have the global mass appeal that is the satirical target of Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf. And nor does he want it. There are plenty of people who will watch him once, miss the point, and move on happily to one of the Lee bêtes noires like Michael Macintyre. (I know one highly intelligent, if perhaps slightly out of touch, octogenarian who declared Lee ‘an alt-right comedian’.) The upside is that, even with his slightly smaller pool of self-selective viewers, there are more than enough to fuel endless national tours and four seasons of an award-winning BBC TV show that last aired when the current crop of new Oxford students were still in primary school.

For Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, Stew has gone high-concept. The stated topic he’s addressing is alpha male bullies who dominate both politics and comedy. He draws a disturbingly convincing line between, on the one hand, the crass weight-throwing of Trump, Musk and their ilk, and on the other, right-leaning super-rich comedians with Netflix specials like Ricky Gervais, who use the cover of comedy to ridicule and stir up prejudice against some of the most defenceless members of society.

This is not unfamiliar ground for Lee. His readiness to criticise other comedians (as part of his act) is legendary. And there is one section of the current show in which he describes being beaten up by Michael Macintyre’s manager, while Barbara Windsor watched on in horror (‘and she was married to one of the Krays’). Whether it’s a true story or not doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that it drives home the idea that populism is a cover for violence and aggression. As an image it goes hand in glove (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) with Lee’s description, which I can’t get out of my head unfortunately, of Nigel Farage settling down to have a wank.

The high concept comes with the ‘Man-Wulf’, a hilarious werewolf costume (with a tiny penis) that Lee dons to embody the alpha male comedian with his Netflix special. He’s even commissioned an entire (and very catchy) soundtrack for the show from Glaswegian garage rockers The Primevals. No expense has been spared. The costume, and the surprisingly old-fashioned slapstick comedy it engenders, bring a whole new dimension to the show. It’s certainly funny, but Lee is too clever to settle for just that. It’s also deliberately lowering its brow and that of the audience to underline his point about the vacuity of populist rabble-rousing.

For a performer normally so stripped back, depending on little more than a microphone and some fake quotations scribbled on cards, the costume, complete with dry ice, is a major departure, like suddenly finding an alien spaceship in the middle of Waiting for Godot. It reminded me of the sketches Lee included in the first season of his TV Comedy Vehicle: funny, but somehow over-produced. Not exactly what he’s really about. In previous shows Lee has become synonymous with deranged, repetitious routines that went on for twenty minutes like a piece of experimental rock from 1967. They may have been more bizarre than the Man-Wulf, but they were also perhaps more echt Stew.

Whatever the apparent theme of a Stewart Lee show is, his abiding main interest has never wavered. While the topic may be politics, the obsession remains the same: what he cares about is the true nature and purpose of comedy. He has dug deeper into this question than any other comedian alive, and he’s always done it with conviction, self-mockery and burning honesty. That flame remains undimmed. Let it out.