It must be frustrating for a (mostly) topical comedian like Stewart Lee to still be performing a show he wrote three years ago, but the smartly contrived Tornado/Snowflake double header of sets are not only worthy of a longer run, but the current run of dates are rearranged shows booked long before the pandemic.

There are a few nods to the intervening period - during which Lee confesses to having let himself go - but the show is ostensibly the same one he performed at Symphony Hall just days before the first lockdown in March 2020, as well as one at Oxford days prior to Warwick. The latter became apparent during an ongoing discussion with an audience member who had attended both, enabling her and Lee to compare the two. “This bit went better in Oxford... strange crowd tonight... but you can only play what’s in front of you.”

Bemoaning the audience’s failure to grasp the cerebral quality of his material - and therefore get the jokes - is the acerbic comedian’s trademark of course, as he intricately constructs a range of comic conceits before deconstructing them again. The two sets - whose initial premises are an erroneous Netflix listing and where a ‘leftie’ comic currently sits in the grand scheme of things - naturally extend way beyond simple gags, and as he’s at pains to point out, certainly no ‘quips’, but riotously funny throughout.

Another Lee trait is the merciless skewering of his contemporaries, which this time ranged from Josh Widdicombe and Jimmy Carr to Tony Parsons and Dave Chappelle, ninth in Rolling Stone’s list of the top stand-ups of all time (somewhat below Lee’s own status as The Times’ number 1) but destined to be inextricably linked with rotisserie chicken and a drip tray of juices from now on.

As usual he saved the best/worst for Ricky Gervais. After brilliantly summing up his After Life TV show in a line I can’t repeat here, Lee also spends too long (the critic he quotes was right) demonstrating how it is in fact impossible for his apparent nemesis to ‘say the unsayable’.

That laborious sequence aside, Tornado/Snowflake is another brilliantly constructed show that sees Lee taking considered intellectual constructs to abstract, farcical conclusions that are still funnier than they are smart - which I rather hope is precisely the point. Roll on the new show, which is already in the works.

Four stars.

Reviewed by Steve Adams at Warwick Arts Centre on Friday 11 February. 

You can catch Stewart Lee at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on Sunday 22 May & Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury, Tues 24 May