Stewart Lee is standing in his underpants, with a miniscule prosthetic penis attached, wearing a pair of giant furry feet as he asks a woman in the audience: “Does this look like a midlife crisis, in your professional opinion?”

He’s near the end of his latest show, a two-hour tour de force split into three parts in which he delivers classic comedy from his liberal worldview, a reactionary right-wing alternative and a punishingly experimental combination of both.

Lee has long-mastered comedy. He has already been dubbed the greatest living stand-up by the broadsheets, a decade or so after being branded the 41st best stand-up ever by the telly. Almost a decade on again, Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf feels like his zenith.

The show he’s been building towards since his return to comedy in 2005. All the hits are here. He has a pop at Trump, Farage, the failings of the miserable, joyless Labour government.

The king of the callback even calls back to two gags from his acclaimed 2007 Edinburgh show, titled 41st best stand-up. As ever with Lee, you assume they’re intentional. But he could just have been recycling the bits. Or maybe he forgot he ever did them.

And it’s within that double doubt, that even the most hardcore fans have, where the magic happens. There are jokes, of course there are. But as Lee tells us all the time, he hates jokes. In fact, he tells fans in his latest show he hates comedy. He’s sick of it.

But what elevates Lee above other stand-ups, living or dead, is the bravery to make his jokes fail in exactly the way he wants them to. Even his physical stunts are perfectly manipulated to go wrong to derive laughter from an audience.

One long-time fan was overheard during the interval saying even he was unsure if one section was part of the act or if he was “just losing it”. But that’s the thing with Lee, just when you think he’s pushed your patience beyond its limit, the pay-off is always worth it.

In the second half of his show, Lee dons a full werewolf costume to take on the persona of an alter-ego, a hard-nosed, hard-right, hardman who makes offensive quips before telling people to “suck my d***” if they were offended by his bigotry.

And after pondering if he, as a left-leaning, woke comedian could be the answer to the question “Where are all the tough good guys?”, Lee launches into a hybrid of delivering his traditionally-tediously politically correct comedy in the style of a populist gag merchant who might have been offered a $60million Netflix deal or a spot at the Saudi comedy festival.

It was once asked of Lionel Messi, the greatest living footballer at that time, if he could “do it on a wet Tuesday night in Stoke”. You feel a cold Wednesday night in Doncaster is the comedic equivalent of the cliché. The answer was yes. Two nights, actually.

Of course, Lee plays to the gallery. Taking swipes at the likes of Elon Musk, Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr goes down well with the liberal intelligentsia of Doncaster, for what it is.

But while morally superior, he is able to portray himself as the outsider and often the butt of the joke. And he literally does not even have to say anything to draw laughter from the crowd.

His attempt to sit on stool, Dave Allen-style, while dressed like an evil Womble before trying to grab an out-of-reach microphone is the best piece of physical comedy since Del Boy fell through the bar.

And who else could drop in references to the surrealist paintings of Ithell Colquhoun and the avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey and still get laughs?

Yes, there are rambling monologues exploring the cultural relevance of comedy, soul-searching questions about if people are born evil or if they become evil in time.

But the reason audiences keep coming to see Lee, despite him berating them for 20 years, and the reason why he is arguably the greatest ever stand-up comedian, is because he does all that and makes it really funny. Which is sort of the point, really.