“YOU’VE got to up your game”, comedian Stewart Lee mockingly berated the High Wycombe audience of his show at the Swan last night, after claiming yet another of his jokes didn’t get the response it deserved.

He claimed his exasperation at the crowd was not part of his regular routine, joking that a fair portion of Wycombe’s audience simply seemed too slack-witted to keep up.

I didn’t believe that for a second – Lee’s carefully polished, precision-calibrated act has no doubt been scolding audiences up and down the country in the name of laughs on his latest tour, Much A-Stew About Nothing.

Lee is frequently regarded as one of the finest stand-ups working today, and last night’s performance did nothing to make me disagree. He delivered almost two hours of consistently excellent material and I would happily have stayed for two more.

His latest tour changes depending on what night you see it. He performs three of six half-hour long routines that will form the basis for his next BBC TV series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

Last night the subjects up for discussion were, as ever, lofty ones – pornography and the death of the human imagination, racism and depression – well, that of a 45-year-old father of two who has undergone a vasectomy and is a “functioning alcoholic”, anyway.

There was no support act – Lee effectively warmed up the audience himself up with ten minutes of material centring on his hatred of dogs, while finding time to take pot shots at drug dealers’ poor attitudes to canine fouling, Cameron’s Big Society, the plight of the overseas factory worker and, again, the audience for being half-asleep on a Sunday evening.

Those familiar with Lee’s work will find no shocks in the type of material here. Sharp, brilliantly sarcastic, slightly aggressive and always hilarious, he panders to his image as a middle class lefty, using his act to comment on himself, his material, and the audience and their reactions throughout.

Then there is his habit of repetition (“I hate dogs”, he barks for the umpteenth time, still generating laughs) and patience stretching pauses and silences. One sequence sees Lee deploy one of his favourite tricks, a one-sided imaginary telephone conversation that is so convincingly done, and goes on for so long, that I think I might have forgotten there was no one on the other end of the line at one point.

The beauty of Lee is the way his material moves one extreme to the other – what seems to start off as a fairly obvious gag about a UKIP statement on immigration, for instance, eventually becomes a conceptual trip to the birth of the universe and beyond as he embarks on a wild flight of – not so much fancy, but logical reductionism, veering off in all directions as he does so.

Another gag in the same segment takes us on a very funny fantasy of Lee’s imaginary wives and how good they are at putting reactionary cab drivers in their place. He has a great ability to marry knowing (and occasionally morose) whimsy with harder edged material that earns laughs in unexpected ways.

Lee isn’t for everyone – the area of the audience I was in lapped up his show, so whether there were blanker sections of the crowd (as he sardonically claimed) was hard to judge. But certainly one or two may have found his habit of stretching his jokes to breaking point frustrating.

Personally I think his confidence and boldness to push his audiences in this way is what makes him stand out from the stand-up crowd. I thought his act last night was hilarious and brilliantly delivered.

I enjoyed every moment and was several times reduced to tears by the strength of flavours in this superbly judged comedic stew of ideas.

For future tour dates go to http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/gigs.php