In the bar of London's Soho Theatre is a buzzing and somewhat baffled crowd supping wine and digesting the show which has just finished upstairs.

It's there that I'm lying in wait for the imp-like Claudia O'Doherty. She's the writer, solo performer and visionary comedian of Pioneer, the follow-up to her last show The Telescope, which was tipped on the streets as the best comedy production at the Edinburgh Festival last year.

O'Doherty appears, tiny and sharp in the theatre bar, dressed a little like a carpenter. It's an excellent disguise to keep journalists and fans away.

Approaching a subject such as O'Doherty is filled with potential and at the same time quite unenviable. Her work speaks so vibrantly for itself, baffling and clear at the same time, as all great comedy should do.

I stumble through poorly prepared questions, each one feeling wooden and disabled as I ask.

O'Doherty gives me the impression that she's a great deal smarter than me, a great deal funnier and more than a little disdainful of my crap interview technique.

But, of course, she would be. She's relentlessly toured two provocative, unsettling and hilarious mould-breakers for years, uncompromisingly beating her own path through the jungle of Michael McIntyres and "those Russell comedians" which fellow auteur Stewart Lee so fully derides.

Her 2012 Edinburgh show The Telescope was a fragmented and highly original dismantling of stand-up, theatre and the mental falling apart of a comedy school escapee, all woven around the warp of an antique telescope, spattered with the weft of unsettling vignettes about mind control, supplication, Antipodean stereotypes and century-spanning love affairs.

You kind of have to have seen it.

Adequately following up such a bizarre work will always be a difficult task and few would be capable of doing so without falling into a well of self-doubt and audience pandering. But O'Doherty is one step ahead of the curve with Pioneer.

While browsing the schedule of her forward-thinking management company the Invisible Dot, I tried to imagine what Pioneer would be made up of. O'Doherty as a Magellan-like character, tri-cornered hat and eyepiece in hand, following the sun over the horizon? That'd make sense.

Naturally, my expectations couldn't be wider of the mark. Pioneer is about Pioneer, the company which makes CD players, projectors and the like. Of course it is - that's what the show's called. The pattern in O'Doherty's naming convention is made clear - it says it on the tin.

After a few minutes of mock-preamble which divides the room into the understanding and the scared, O'Doherty launches into the show proper, explaining the reasoning behind the show's inception - sponsorship.

Pioneer, our beloved technology giant, benevolent leader and provider of digital equipment at affordable prices, is the supposed sponsor and centrepiece of the show.

Drawing from the same fourth wall-shattering vein as The Telescope, this show is peppered with faux product-placement and fawning expressions of love for the untouchable manufacturer of electronic goods.

The perceived love affair with the conglomerate is all the more convincing because the show is technically excellent. A translucent projection screen provides a substrata for sharply produced graphics, as well as indicating a deeper level of thought regarding the fourth wall and how sponsorship - even an imagined one - colours art.

As The Telescope was free-wheeling and cut up to the point of drawing sideways glances from a bemused audience, Pioneer is lighter in tone, warmer of heart and basically nowhere near as scary.

It gives a lot of other off-beat comedy a serious run for its money. In fact, it drives it straight off the road and out of the race.

O'Doherty is staunchly doing her own thing and it works brilliantly, whether she's using a telescope, projector or jeweller's eye-glass.

Claudia O'Dohertyis on the bill of The Invisible Dot's New Wave 2013 Tour to Cardiff, Manchester and Cambridge. Details: www.theinvisibledot.com.