Jack Dee, New Theatre, Oxford

A welcome to Jack Dee's world is either an invitation you can't resist or, occasionally, one you wish you hadn't accepted, like being stuck in one of the suffocating domestic scenes that he is so adept at painting.

A welcome to Jack Dee's world is either an invitation you can't resist or, occasionally, one you wish you hadn't accepted, like being stuck in one of the suffocating domestic scenes that he is so adept at painting. I've seen him bore and score for England in the performance stakes.

The doyen of deadpan, he has a consistent shtick - energy levels and material are things that Dee controls more tightly than other comedians. Nevertheless, certain weaknesses are detectable this evening. Over the past year I've see plenty of helpings of Dee live, hosting his recent BBC show Jack Dee - Live at the Apollo and doing a gig in Aylesbury as part of a warm-up before this 96-date national tour. The latter date particularly stands out for a top-quality turn and a daring joke about the late Dr David Kelly.

There was nothing daring about tonight's show, however, and even if some people wore expressions of delight on their faces, what they were actually getting was Dee-lite. Repetitively incredulous rather than superbly indignant, Dee strode seamlessly through routines such as: a stereotypical tour of Britain (where Harvey Nichols in Leeds sold tin baths); the futility of shopping in B&Q; bar bores and drunken antics. The latter was largely a stock-in-trade collection of visual gags and nothing that had any depth, such as his own personal experience of his battle against booze might have given.

Jack Dee is to be admired for his brand of observational comedy, for airing the irritating minutiae of life eloquently and thoroughly. There were examples of that in this new set, such as a routine about collecting a prescription where he tries to understand why anyone should wait 20 minutes for what is essentially someone to count 14 pills into a container. He picks up every nuance of the situation, such as the archaic dot-matrix printer that seems to take an eternity to grind out the instructions for the label - "I'm not that ill," he quips. The 42-year-old comic's opinion on iPods was also worth listening to: deriding their appearance, he likened them to an aid for incontinence.

But such moments of illumination were all too rare. A section on wicker heightened the sense that his latest collection of material was a pale imitation of the past. Musings on its tensile strength, and a familiar gag about how, on an African safari, a wicker carriage on a hot-air balloon would appear like a picnic hamper to a lion didn't reach the heights of an old routine about wicker, craft fairs and the criminally insane.

Not a vintage performance, then, but there's no evidence that Dee has run out of steam. As time passes, he looks more like Britain's answer to the veteran Jackie Mason. Both have terrific audience-control and a high level of consistency, but there will always be troughs to make the peaks look better.

Touring to 2 July ( www.offthekerb.co.uk)