“Do you know why the Incredible Hulk’s pants stay together?” he asks while chatting about his new show Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, which has been on stage at the Oxford Playhouse this week.

“The excuse was that Dr Bruce Banner got Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four to make him trousers from unstable molecules which would expand around his body. He’d had the foresight to do that!”

But why are we talking about metamorphosing from man into beast?

Because that’s what Lee does during the show, as he takes on the character of ‘a tough-talking werewolf comedian from the dark forests of the subconscious who hates humanity’. He must prove that his style of stand-up is not obsolete ‘in the face of a wave of callous Netflix-endorsed comedy of anger, monetising the denigration of minorities for millions of dollars’.

We’re discussing the show against a backdrop of social media supremos Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg making waves – X/Twitter owner Musk with dubious claims about child sexual exploitation investigations and Zuckerberg by removing Facebook’s fact-checkers. And their exploits have helped to solidify Lee’s latest show.

“It’s typical of some of the things I write that the worse the world gets, the funnier the show seems to be!” says Lee. “It’s started to make a lot more sense in the last week as the news has got much worse much more quickly.

“Musk and Zuckerberg are making a stink about the consequences of speech, which is sort of what the show’s about. Even four weeks ago that felt like a bit of an abstract discussion. So, it seems to be coming together at a rate of knots, rather tragically. Like a horrible parasite feeding off the misery!”

Shining a spotlight on the comedic process has always been a feature of Lee’s performances, and the likes of Ricky Gervais and Dave Chapelle will have found their ears burning as a result of his recent shows Basic Lee, Snowflake/Tornado and Content Provider.

It seems like those shows provided the groundwork for Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf.

“It’s about asking ‘do jokes and speech have consequences?’ he says.

“First as me and then I do the same kind of stuff as a Netflix right-leaning reactionary werewolf comedian, which is actually really good fun and goes down really well. People love that stuff, they love that horrible comedy!

“The talking points of this show look like they will only continue to be more of a big deal as the social media giants strip away their guard rails and as it looks like Kemi Badenoch’s Tories are going to roll with that rather than standing up to it,” he adds.

“It looks like Reform, who are the real opposition these days, let’s face it, will have to cherry-pick their way through it to try not to alienate potential donors. All that kind of stuff that’s bubbling under the surface has become relevant to the show.

“I should also point out that a lot of these points are being addressed by an overweight man in an extremely hot werewolf costume, so if it sounds very serious it’s being done in an extremely silly way!”

As well as raiding the dressing-up box for his werewolf outfit, his now familiar Showaddywaddy-style jacket will also be getting another outing.

“I’m kind of resolved to wearing those Teddy Boy coats for the foreseeable future,” he admits. “I like the idea that it looks like Russ Abbott or Freddie Starr or one of these old-fashioned comics.

“I like the fact that it looks like you’ve come out to do an entertainment show, and then you do it slightly differently.”

Doing it differently is certainly one of Lee’s trademarks.

How many other comics have co-written an Olivier Award-winning production (Jerry Springer, The Opera), re-written Shakespeare’s Porter scene from Macbeth for the RSC and made documentaries (2019’s King Rocker about Brummie band The Nightingales), all while working as a newspaper columnist and music journalist.

However, this won’t be the first time he’s taken on a spoof right-wing persona. Although this time he believes the public are more receptive.

“The last time I tried to do a parody of reactionary North American comics was about 10-15 years ago,” Lee recalls.

“I tried to do a character called Bacon Face who was a sort of Canadian road comic. I made a mask out of raw bacon which I used to wear!

“He would be complaining about everything, but it didn’t quite land. It might be that I’m better now at that kind of thing or it might be that Netflix, Ricky Gervais and these sorts of thing mean that the average person knows what that kind of comedy is.

“It’s difficult to avoid it because it makes headlines as well. So I think that people ‘get’ the Man-Wulf character more just because they’ve been exposed to that sort of thing more.

“Sometimes I tend to forget that I’m a North London metropolitan liberal elitist and I work in comedy and, probably, a lot of the things I’m thinking about, I’m aware of them a little bit ahead of the curve.”

Touring a show for around 18 months can be a challenge, as the material can be overtaken by events. This time, however, the world seems to be catching up with Lee.

“What’s happened with the last two shows is that by the time they were out on the road, some of the issues in them had started to land,” he says.

“The last one (Basic Lee) was partly about how everyone’s suddenly aware of mental health conditions, things like autism or ADHD. It was partly about the world viewed through that lens. It wasn’t made explicit, but I think people had more of an understanding of that terminology.

“With the current show, I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid thinking about taste and the impacts of speech because Musk’s made it clear he’s going to weaponise that, and Zuckerberg has just announced that all the fact-checking guard rails are going to be removed from Facebook and all of his apps so it’s going to be interesting to see how that pans out.”

Lee recently deactivated his personal X/Twitter and Facebook accounts and he urges others to do likewise.

“I think we’ve all got to that that,” he declares. “We’ve got to get off Twitter and Facebook and we’ve got to get our kids off it. We’ve got to stop them using AI to write things because we need to understand how false information is being weaponised and how information is cherry-picked and re-written.

“We’ve got to understand how information is constructed enough to see through it. So, you can’t be writing your university essays on AI, and you can’t be getting your news from Facebook or Twitter anymore because the algorithms are being skewed to push far-right talking points.

“The next problem is we’re going to have to stop using Amazon, so where we get our books and things from, I don’t know, given that every shop’s gone bust! That’ll be the next thing when Jeff Bezos throws in the towel to a fascist government as well!”

Has he got a point, warning us about the tech bro billionaires and the damage they are causing? Or is he the boy who cried wulf? Time will tell.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf is at the Oxford Playhouse, tonight, February 8 before touring the country – including dates in High Wycombe on February 15 and 16