THE trouble with so much stand-up is that it is limited in the scope, ambition, material and dress-down dress code of its attention-seeking proponents.

Comedy should be about more than making you laugh, and it is when you see the multi-talented, multi-disciplined Bill Bailey, who makes others look inadequate, incomplete, by comparison. He sets the benchmark, and what’s more his shows are still improving, tour by tour, benefiting from the trick of seeming to roam randomly and yet be ultra-focused.

Eddie Izzard had his sublime surrealist/absurdist hot streak; Mark Steel, Mark Thomas and Jeremy Hardy have kept the red flag flying high; Peter Kay has the common touch; Dara O Briain and Dylan Moran can spin a yarn with whimsy; Mitch Benn and Tim Minchin bring music to the party. Bailey does all this and he has a wonderful eye for visual impact too, as well as a turn of phrase that can fizz from the florid and fanciful to the feisty.

Sometimes they merge into one, such as his analysis of the Daily Mail as an accretion of the worst aspects of humanity, “like a rancid stock cube”.

His stage design, five trees bathed in ever-changing light, could have been part of Illuminating York 2013, while on the screen behind, the film imagery for his Downton Abbey dub reggae number had the wit of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python work.

In the blissful absence of an irritating support act, instead the comedy bill was Bill alone, two sets of him each night on Wednesday and Thursday. Correction, the comedy bill was Bill and York; not since O Briain at the Grand Opera House has a comedian used his audience so engagingly, so spontaneously, riffing on whatever unexpected utterances emerged.

He nails the Dorian Grey-skinned Cameron, the word-swallowing Miliband, a Borrowers-sized Clegg and UKIP (“four sozzled blokes from the golf club”). One Direction are mocked too (“five unremarkable gimps from Wetherspoons”), and so are acronyms in text messages, as he launches FAWA, Fight Acronyms With Acronyms.

Bailey mulls over the history of sausage pricking; muses on “the mumbled fog of Scandinavian noise and the occasional English word” in The Killing; and who else could pull off a rap about Thermo Dynamics?

The second half is as much concert as comedy show – no moment better than when the Match of The Day theme is transformed into a Jewish folk dance by playing it slowly in a minor key.

After a poem about Love that reduces relationships to a mundane discussion over lost keys (a one-act play that lasts no more than 30 seconds), Bailey concludes with his uplifting story of his rescue of a live eagle owl from a restaurant’s menu in China and accompanying film of the bird’s release into woodland flight.

“Sometime you’ve got to save one owl,” Bill shouts at the most beautiful sight of the year.

This breathtakingly brilliant performance was the comedy show of year from Bill Bailey, the hippy that makes you so happy.