THERE’S nobody qualified to review Stewart Lee. The comedian himself tells us so towards the end of his gig.

In print, it might sound an arrogant proclamation, but like most of Lee’s material, it’s part of a sophisticated gag working on more levels than we can count.

His jokes simultaneously mock himself, the audience and the whole artifice of stand-up comedy – and they are surpassingly funny.

The cavernous concert hall at Poole’s Lighthouse is a surprising venue for Lee, who affects a shambolic, faltering delivery as he gets his act under way.

He milks that incongruity for comedy, describing part of the audience as ‘chaff’ who will be gone when he is no longer on TV and returns to playing the smaller hall next door.

The first half-hour sees Lee pledging to try a bit of “Islamophobic observational stand-up” to “get the Daily Mail off my back”. But throughout his roundabout route to that point, we know he’s going to deliver something much more clever and funny.

He then gets half an hour of material out of the subject of urine, taking him into edgy territory where he seems, hysterically, to berate audiences like this one for driving comedians to depression.

In the second half, we have a lengthy and often fantastically funny skit about nationalism, and an encore which he says the audience can have without having to go through the motions of applauding him back onto the stage.

Early on, Lee claims every Guardian reader in Poole is assembled in the hall, and that the town’s vegetarian restaurants must be empty. He could easily put together a resoundingly successful act that simply flattered the audience. But he’s way more ambitious than that – and it’s his risky, challenging yet hilarious material that makes him the best in the business.