If you have been watching this weekly half hour of droll polemic (now in its third glorious series), you’re either a dedicated fan of the standup comedian Stewart Lee or you hate his smug, sing-song delivery and smirking repetition and you just enjoy being angry. There seldom seems to be a middle ground where Lee’s concerned.

Like the first two series of Comedy Vehicle, this one takes segments of low-lit standup in front of a club audience and punctuates them with often avant garde VTs exploring an idea that comes from his monologue. In the first series, and to a lesser extent the second, this used to take the form of elaborate sketches featuring usual collaborators such as Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery.
And while this still happens in smaller doses, this series Chris Morris replaces Armando Iannucci as his ireful psychotherapist, acting as a sort of eloquent below-the-line commenter, pre-empting the Lee haters and giving an audibly sneering voice to their loathing in improvised “therapy” sequences. These are often some of the most illuminating bits of the show.

I’ve enjoyed Lee’s TV work since the mid-90s, when I first saw the childish, brilliant nonsense he made with Richard Herring for BBC2, from Fist of Fun to This Morning With Richard Not Judy. And I like how that laddish 90s foolishness has given way to a world-weary, baggy philosopher, gargling thoughts around and around his mouth and refusing to spit them out because he likes the way they taste.
Others find it infuriating and self-indulgent. Or perhaps it’s something to do with his apparent tone of contempt. Or the way he makes a point by relentlessly hitting the same beats again and again to build up traction for his big finish.

He visibly takes great pleasure – I love his genuine delight this series, lots of giggling – in picking out one microscopic aspect of a thing, and repeatedly picking it apart with all the incomprehension of a boy brought up by wolves.
In last week’s episode it was “Paul Nuttall from the Ukips” and his assertion that the best and brightest Bulgarians should stay in Bulgaria rather than coming here to work. He regressed the argument further and further back in time to the origins of the universe, where Nuttall insisted that matter should go back where it came from, preventing the forming of existence itself.

In the late 90s, I saw him do half an hour of standup purely about the lyrics of All Things Bright and Beautiful, which he represented on a flip chart using subsets. Just when you think the repetition is going to kill you, he zooms out to deliver his punchline as if he’s suddenly looking at the Earth from space and wagging a wise finger at mankind. Which is probably where the intense hatred comes in for many. Who does he think he is?

In last week’s episode he quoted from comedian Lee Mack’s autobiography, which accuses him of being “a cultural bully from the Oxbridge mafia who wants to appear morally superior, but couldn’t cut the mustard on a panel game”.
To which (Stewart) Lee replies, grinning: “Cultural bully, honestly. And anyway, you don’t cut mustard, you spread it.” He’s been called meta for all this playing with the form and exposing the workings. But he says himself that he’s playing “the clown of Stewart Lee”.

He gets away with all the haughty, judgmental stuff – for me, anyway – because he sets himself up as a loser. Those sequences where Morris belittles him reduce him to a low-status, tongue-tied fool. The pomposity and high-horse riding he engages in on stage are just basically Oliver Hardy fiddling with his tie and talking in an affected voice.
Like Barry Humphries done up as Dame Edna, he can do and say far more while hiding behind this exaggerated persona. The opening titles of Comedy Vehicle’s first series featured Lee driving through a field in a clown car followed by a brightly dressed circus parade. He often allows you to guess what he’s going to say next, just like a clown wielding a bucket of confetti. It’s inclusive if you look at it like that.

And Lee does get away with a lot. In the last episode of series two, he devoted most of the show (about 20 minutes) to an anecdote about David Cameron snubbing him at Oxford University. He admits right at the end of the story that it isn’t true. He made it up. But he says that what it teaches us about David Cameron is true and, therefore, it’s valid.

Adore him or abhor him, the BBC has already commissioned series four, so he’ll be here for a while yet. Do you rejoice in his unique approach to standup or does his keen cerebral jousting really annoy you? It’s got to be one or the other.