“Each shit series is like a suicide note,” Stewart Lee tells Chris Morris in the first episode of Comedy Vehicle series four; “or like someone that’s carried out a crime and written in blood on the wall, ‘Stop me before I do this again.’” The BBC clearly isn’t getting the message – notwithstanding Lee’s frequent claims to be falling out of their favour. Ah, but maybe those claims are made by the “character” Stewart Lee and not the “real” Stewart Lee. Don’t expect onstage and offstage to mark a clear distinction between the two. There are no clear distinctions in Lee’s public world. Everything’s a wind-up. Everything’s a hall of mirrors.

That was never more the case than in last night’s trailblazer for the new series of Comedy Vehicle. Billed as addressing wealth, it was more specific than that: it was about Lee’s wealth, or lack of it. Of course we expect from Lee a nitpicking analysis of the jokes he’s telling and the reaction they’re getting. But here he’s absorbed not only in the dynamics of his own standup, but in those of his career more widely. The centrepiece is a long routine about Lee’s peevish reaction to being pipped to a Bafta award by Graham Norton’s chat show. A Bafta, he says, would have helped with his money problems – the very problems that compel him to crack jokes that are beneath him, to flatter an audience he despises.

Or so he says. It’s up to us to puzzle out how much of this is heartfelt, and how much an act. (Is he pretending to care about Norton beating him to a Bafta? Or pretending to just be pretending to care? Or is that what he wants us to think?) On the one hand, that’s a fun game to play: Lee’s genius is in having plunged deeper than any other comic into the grey area between truth and fiction, the endless recursiveness of self-revelation and self-deception. That’s enjoyable for performance geeks, but it also illuminates something about human nature; our negative capability to be both miffed (in this instance) and not miffed at the same time.

I enjoy the ambiguity in these routines, without remotely understanding why anyone (the Telegraph critic who walked out; the Dublin journalist who thought he was having a breakdown) would take them seriously. If Lee came onstage dressed as a winky face emoji, he couldn’t signal more clearly that his tongue is in his cheek. The playfulness is much in evidence here – and in the best of his comedy, it’s a precipitous pleasure to be toyed with, to try and track the joke, the target and the significance between the layers of irony.

This first episode is not the best of his comedy. It made me wonder, is “the character Stewart Lee” (as Lee calls his onstage persona) in danger of elbowing the actual Stewart Lee off the stage? I’ve most enjoyed Lee when, alongside the mind-bending performative sleights of hand (all that “Brechtian alienation”, as he calls it here) there are opinions about the world too, and things he cares about – even if they’re implied, and you have to hunt them down. Here: not so much. I know the self-absorption is part of the joke, but it’s still self-absorption, and I can’t bring myself to care about (or indeed believe in) Lee’s struggle to keep hack material out of his shows. That self-pitying shtick works as a counterpoint to weightier, more outward-looking stuff. It feels just a bit thin when obliged to sustain a whole show.

I wouldn’t want to stop him before he does this again, mind you. I’m judging this first episode only by the high standards Lee has set. And even by those standards, there’s great stuff here. The viral progress of his anti-Norton rant – from blaming Bafta, to blaming Norton, to blaming James Corden – is beautifully traced. His high-handed abuse of Corden is joltingly funny – both in its shoring up of Lee’s lofty self-esteem, and as a reminder of how seldom you hear those in the gilded back-slappy celebrity club being bluntly nasty about one another. Yes, I’ve sometimes regretted that Lee’s live work these days is always cast as a rehearsal for his TV show. But we’re lucky to have the TV show, which is seldom less than brilliant, tricksy, brain-nourishing, mickey-taking good fun. Roll on the next five episodes.