Marc Evans finds himself laughing out loud, while others scowl, to Stewart Lee’s rapier wit and crushing put-downs in a night of postmodern humour in Oxford

“Who knows more about stand-up – me or you?”

As questions go, you don’t get more rhetorical than this. I’d challenge anyone to say they know more about the art of standing on a stage and trying to make people laugh than Stewart Lee.

After 27 years in the business, performing hundreds of shows a year, Lee was back at the Playhouse to preview material for series four of his BBC2 show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. And the audience was literally given a lesson in comedy.

Broken up into four half-hour segments, almost every routine, idea and comic phrase was analysed, dissected, explained and justified by Lee, lecturing the audience why they should be laughing – and when they shouldn’t.

“Do you know how black comedy works?” he berates one crowd member for giggling too early during a piece about the death of his childhood pet mouse. Patience and concentration are virtues in audiences as far as Lee is concerned – one of a number of his requirements for the paying public in order for everyone to get the most out of the live experience. Not looking at your phone is another, delivered via a brutal and unrepeatable warning about what would happen to said mobile if he caught it lighting up your face during the show.

He treats us to one urine-heavy routine, taking in childhood trauma and the beginnings of his desire to make people laugh. Then blames us (well, audiences generally) for the death of every comedian who has taken their own life. What makes Lee so compelling is that it’s impossible to predict what is coming out of his mouth next. He reprimands himself for using ‘kids say the funniest things’ material, only to turn it into a device to link in to an earlier piece about prostitutes plying their trade at the end of his garden. Like I said, it pays to concentrate.

“No-one is qualified to review me,” he claims, and he certainly has a point. As if to prove this, he finishes with a piece about newspaper columnists’ reactions to the refugee crisis and spends at least 10 minutes imagining The Sunday Times’ Rod Liddle covered in various foodstuffs.

Again, this ends with Lee’s analysis of why certain foods (gravy, pork pie jelly) are funny, and others aren’t. And why clavicle is funnier than shoulder.

I can’t explain why tears of laughter were streaming down my face, or why others around me were unmoved. I guess it just sums up Lee’s ability to divide audiences.