What is Stewart Lee’s position in the comedy marketplace? And whither his “metropolitan liberal elite” sensitivities in the post-PC age? These are the questions Lee considers in his first new live material for three years, divvied up into two sets: Tornado and Snowflake. Tonight, he tells us with his trademark mix of disdain and high self-regard, they add up to “a four-star show with a three-star audience”. He may be underselling himself: several of tonight’s joyously funny and bloody-minded routines find Lee on scintillating form.

He has been around so long, delivering such consistently strong and adventurous standup, that it’s easy to take Lee for granted. Without him these last few years, his liberal crowd has been “starved of the opportunity to participate in mass agreement”, he crows – quick as ever to incorporate other people’s criticism into his act. But there’s more to Lee’s shows than progressive love-ins. Yes, the sarcasm and abuse to which he subjects metropolitan betes noires is often fortifying and funny. But his work is most intriguing when it complicates our thinking, when his intentions – ideologically and comedically – are tricky to trace, and when he turns his fire on lefty shibboleths.

Witness Snowflake’s giddiest routine, which spoofs the cult of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It’s a thrill to attend to this thought crime against bien pensant opinion, as Lee celebrates PWB’s discovery – for the first time in entertainment history – of direct audience address. He then segues into a section on the futility of laundering James Bond for the woke era, imagining the character transformed under Waller-Bridge’s influence into a genitally diminished spy who rapes aphids.

This, in a show posing as a defence of the snowflake sensibility! The trick Snowflake pulls off is to succeed as an elegy to political correctness, replete with acoustic guitar ballad on the subject, while being far more confrontational than snowflakes are meant to be. There’s a choice routine about Tony Parsons and cesspits, and a set piece about Ricky Gervais “saying the unsayable” that expresses rage and ridicule at that idea without articulating a single word. Like much of Lee’s comedy, it is infantile and cerebral at the same time.

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Next to these routines, his material on health and safety and “political correctness gone mad” – a litany of bizarre perils to which his gran’s generation cheerfully exposed themselves – feels uncharacteristically straightforward, but no less funny for it.

The opening hour, Tornado, is just as rich, and derives from a misleading listing about sharks falling from the sky that Lee’s standup show was given on Netflix. This prompts reflection on Lee’s place in the comedy firmament, as Alan Bennett damns him with scholarly praise in the London Review of Books, and Dave Chappelle’s security team chase him through Chinatown.

The latter is one of those dreamlike anecdotes, slipping their moorings from fact to fantasy, in which Lee specialises. Is he, it obliquely asks, “the world’s best living standup” or an impotent scourge of the world’s best living standups? There is certainly evidence for the former in tonight’s material, including the unlikely Bennett pastiche with which he closes Act One. That routine and others find Lee trying new things, putting on voices and jumping around, like a standup enjoying himself in a looser, less beady way than in the past. One of these shows alone would mark a triumphant return for the liberal not-so-elite’s favourite standup. Two is a real treat.

• At Leicester Square theatre, London, until 25 January. Then touring.