Stewart Lee’s previous stand-up show, Content Provider, is one of my top 10 sets of all time. His follow-up, Tornado/Snowflake, lumbers a little under the weight of expectation, but it’s an enviable load to carry.

This is ostensibly two shows divided by an interval, but the distinction between them is a little blurred. Both spend more time mocking his career and ridiculing individual comedians than Content Provider did. He’s the self-described figurehead of the metropolitan elite, yet his references to political events are muted. There is, though, a deftly constructed routine lacerating the complaint of his gran’s demographic — “It’s political correctness gone mad!” — that he deploys as a brutally eloquent defence of the snowflake generation.

Tornado sees him despairing at the state of his career and his health. “I’m deaf, I’m blind, I’m grey, I’m fat,” the 51-year-old sighs, recounting the levelling experience of a nurse suggesting he do some “chair-based activity”.

For some time, he explains, the online description of his Netflix special had, inexplicably, been taken from the site’s entry on the inane Sharknado disaster films, in which sharks rain down on terrified Americans.

From here, he moves on to roast comedians whose sets haven’t been misbilled by Netflix: Jimmy Carr, Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle. The last of these is the lead in an extended mini drama he creates around the night he performed in the same venue as the American comic and tried to befriend him.

Those who have read his book, which meticulously unpicks his own routines, know that, in theory at least, there are two Stewart Lees: the amiable real person and the irascible comic he constructs. Just as theatrical mask work pretends to hide the performer, but actually magnifies them, so Stewart Lee the Comedian allows Lee space to create fantastical riffs around real events — such as the surreal finale to his Chappelle routine, which involves a chase through the streets of Soho.

Tornado ends with an unexpected parody of Alan Bennett’s prose, prompted by the writer’s faint praise that Lee is “the JL Austin of what is now rather a sloppy profession”. There is something about the comic’s lilting Yorkshire accent and facial contortions here that feels positively playful.

The second half, Snowflake, is the stronger by far, dealing with what can and can’t be said in these fevered times. He returns to savage Gervais and other self-proclaimed victims who aim to “say the unsayable” by literally doing just that: hilariously attempting to force “unsayable” words past the barrier of his teeth.

What makes Snowflake fly is his abrupt ideological swerves. He teases lefties who have been “starved of the opportunity to participate in mass agreement” since Content Provider. He’s probably the first liberal to skewer Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the praise lavished on her to-camera asides in Fleabag. Her woke 007 he imagines as a futile, sexless spy reduced to bizarre forms of bestiality. There are parodies of Enid Blyton’s racism, a father’s despair at computer games, even a comedy song as a finale. His shtick is beautifully pointed, but, given the box-office success of this show, should be received as ironically as it’s given.