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To younger audiences, Harry Enfield may be best known for his Prince-turned-King Charles in Channel 4 satirical soap opera The Windsors – and it’s in character as the monarch that he enters the stage for this Audience With … event, reviewing his whole career. By the end, he’s staked a strong claim to be considered head of our comedy state, with a show anthologising a formidably comprehensive array of personae, catchphrases and showbiz anecdotes from Enfield’s 40-plus years making funny TV.

Not for the first time in career retrospectives like this, I came away marvelling at just how many indelible characters and sketches of Enfield’s have entered common currency; have become totems, indeed, of the times in which we live(d). Not that Enfield makes any such claims for himself; there’s nothing self-congratulatory about this show. Quite the opposite: the 64-year-old wears his iconoclasm like a badge of pride, with material that’s often as indelicate as the best of the jokes with which, back in the 80s and 90s, he made his name.

The structure here is straightforwardly chronological, with Enfield briskly dispatching his youth and young adulthood (boarding school run by Benedictine monks; teen rebellion in the era of punk) then finding himself in the vanguard of satire (Spitting Image; Friday Night Live) at alternative comedy’s peak. In a show, produced by Fane, that frequently finds Enfield crediting others for his successes, we revisit his co-creation (with his then plasterer pal Paul Whitehouse) of perky kebab shop owner Stavros and the mouthy Thatcherite icon Loadsamoney.

The latter is revived to deliver a new sketch tonight, as is his popmungous DJ alter ego Dave Nice – who, 30 years on, is now a rightwing podcaster. Elsewhere, Enfield performs afresh snatches of his favourite sketches of old: a dash of Mr Cholmondley-Warner here, a pinch of Wayne and Waynetta Slob there. With that latter skit (about Waynetta’s desire for “a brown baby”) and others, you wonder whether this cheerfully unreconstructed act might be about to blunder across some threshold of contemporary sensitivity. But he’s more artful than he lets on, and chauvinism is almost always the butt rather than a feature of the joke.

Meanwhile, the greatest hits just keep coming, with always engaging background detail and eyecatching snippets of biography to boot: the mum who once worked as a spy; his stepdad role to Lily and Alfie Allen. The celeb gossip comes gilt-edged: a Whitney Houston here, a Nelson Mandela there, and a drunken session with Paul McCartney and George Harrison that inspires Enfield’s “calm down” Scousers sketch. It’s the characters that really wow you, though: the remarkable ability to distil a personality, sometimes a whole social type, into this or that telling tic, speech pattern or (catch)phrase – then perform it in such a way as to engrave it on the hearts, and funny bones, of a nation.

Enfield has that ability in spades, and retains it, making of this touring show the most evocative trip down memory lane, and a treat in the moment too.

• Harry Enfield is at G Live, Guildford, tonight and the Forum, Bath, on Monday; then touring.