Like most of us, Stewart Lee has been lying low for the last couple of years, but he’s re-emerged like a magnificent middle-aged butterfly, a little plumper and greyer yet manifestly galvanised by the cornucopia of material made available by recent worldwide events and movements. And, despite one critic’s observation that Lee’s audiences don’t laugh but merely sit and nod in agreement, he’s both immediately hilarious and refreshingly unsettling – the way in which he ridicules himself, the audience, his artform, his comedy peers, and indeed most aspects of human interaction, is incredibly freeing, and very, very funny.

The show comprises two sets: Snowflake explores the Covid-Brexit era and comments on the ‘anti-woke’ movement while Tornado focuses on Lee’s status as a comedian, being both declared “the world’s greatest living standup” by the Times yet remaining insignificant enough on Netflix to have his show sit above a listing describing it as, “reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.”

An Oxford graduate himself and uncharacteristically demonstrating delight and gratitude at being at last ‘out’ (his trademark look is one of enduring disdain), Monday night’s Lee was a little warmer and affectionate than the one I’m used to seeing on TV. That’s not to say his sets were any less brutal than usual, more you got the sense of witnessing a man who was immensely happy to be back on the stage and sharing space with likeminded souls (not that I feel I can actually compare my mind to Lee’s in any way).

Snowflake/Tornado is dense show, but generously so. You can expect Lee’s trademark deconstruction of all material as he proceeds to deliver it (turning the lens on himself, his technique, and the audience’s anticipated and actual response) and sharp and deliciously contemptuous improvisation, but you’ll also be treated to an expert rendition of, for example, a supposed 1950s horror story written by Alan Bennett as well as a quick, perfect joke about the 90s boy band Bros.

Lee goes from the sublime to the ridiculous in a way that makes other comedians seem basic, and he’s gleefully aware of this yet somehow manages to ultimately come across as modest. Indeed, such juxtapositions run throughout his work. His direct observations regarding the pandemic, recent movements such as Black Lives Matter and transgender rights, and of course the state of our current government, were on the surface minimal, delivered quickly and in a seemingly ‘off-the-cuff’ manner, yet of course he was conjuring deeper, more unsettling analysis of these issues while we thought we were laughing about a cess pit (for example…).

Lee always wins. His brand of self-deprecation elevates him. His ability to engage with criticism from the genuine leftfield always leaves the critic looking foolish, his willingness to linger on a joke, to push it to its absolute limit, to not pander to short attention spans and play, masterfully, with repetition, is brave, brilliant, and belly-laughingly funny. As Lee points out, real life has overtaken comedy in terms of absurdity, and so there is no better time to go see a comedian who manages to take everything apart and put it back together in a way that at first makes no sense and then somehow mysteriously all comes together beautifully. Perfect.

Fucking funny, as ever. So that’s that bit of the review done.

Now to more serious matters. As a politically correct liberal comic, Lee tells us, he’s not sure how he fits into a comedy scene increasingly dominated by right-wing, ‘punching down’ piss-takers of the Ricky Gervais/ Jeremy Clarkson mould. Except he’s not, not really. Politically correct, that is. Liberal: yes, in the sense that liberals like to have their cake and eat it: in this case, mocking racists whilst simultaneously employing the racial tropes they claim to disown.

It is no coincidence that it is precisely the most trope-ridden part of the show - an extended impersonation of an oversexed black man slavering over his rotisserie chicken - that is the first to get a sustained round of applause. The crowd, after all, is an unremitting sea of whiteness, like an EDL rally without the tattoos - quite a feat in a city as multicultural as Oxford.

I’m not saying Lee himself is a racist; but then I don’t buy this view of racism as an individual pathology. Racism is a structural condition of the neocolonial world we inhabit, and its cultural traces are everywhere. The question is, whether we try to reveal and expose these traces, or just tap into, reify and ultimately, in this case, monetise them. Lee, it seems - and I hope it is subconsciously - has made his choice.

It’s not even that the lines telling Boris Johnson-voting cunts to go and fuck themselves somehow redeem him; they are part and parcel of the show’s implicit appeal to racism; they are what allows the racial tropes to be enjoyed guilt-free, in a way his audience would never allow themselves to enjoy Clarkson. References to ‘Noddy and the crack-dealing gollywog,’ are doubly pleasing for these people - the superiority that comes from laughing at those who openly hold the stereotype, combined with the illicit thrill of the phrase itself. This is the new way for the middle classes to enjoy their racism, guilt-free. Lee is excoriating of the new ‘anti-PC’ brigade of comedians and pundits claiming white victimhood, and portraying themselves as brave for saying what they claim is unsayable: as he points out, “it turns out, it’s not unsayable; they can say it, to millions of people, for millions of pounds.” The uncomfortable truth, however, is that Lee appears to know exactly where he fits into this new world.

It is a missed opportunity, in my opinion: he is the master of dissecting his audience, mocking them for where they laugh and where they don’t - and, after all, they love to be berated; as Richard Blackwood has pointed out, stand up comedy is precisely the art of attacking the audience. Why not turn the whole routine on its head and expose the audience for enjoying these racial tropes? Lee used to revel in making the audience uncomfortable, but there was little of that tonight. A friend of mine once told me, on her return from a conference on ‘decoloniality’, that when white people can attend such an event and feel perfectly comfortable, it is clear the movement has lost its moral purpose. Not that Lee is claiming to be some kind of movement; but he does claim to be uncomfortable with the times we are living in; why not spread that discomfort around a little - and reveal the depth of complicity we all share in it?