Fifty years ago this spring, Theodor Adorno was about to begin his lecture series, An Introduction to Dialectics, at Frankfurt’s Goethe University when he was interrupted by student protesters. Three women bared their breasts, and scattered rose and tulip petals over him.

Theodor Adorno and Tommy Robinson have so little in common they’re scarcely members of the same species. The former was one of the 20th century’s great philosophers, a virtuoso pianist, a Jewish Marxist and a beguiling writer. The latter is a far-right muppet currently sullying the streets of the north-west of England in his benighted quest to become the region’s Euro MP.

And yet they share this: both have been made to look ridiculous in public. Adorno was humbled by the planned tenderness action (also known as the busenaktion or breast action), while Robinson has been drenched in milkshakes in Warrington and Bury during his campaign. “That’s what you get for being a fascist,” yells one protester on the now-viral Warrington video.

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Is Robinson doomed to be doused in dairy at every campaign stop from now until he, fingers crossed, loses his deposit? It’s possible. And if so, Kelis’s classic, My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard, should be retooled as Robinson’s campaign song (which clearly needs to hire an emergency lyricist).

If you’ve been nursing a PhD thesis on the role of dairy in surreal political protest, now’s your moment to pitch it. Some years ago, angry dairy farmers took their cows to Brussels to protest against falling milk prices and wound up spraying officers who tried to move them on with fresh milk. That day, headline writers were the true winners: “Cow about that!” went one. “Udder farce!” went another.

The idea of such protests is to tell truth to power or the power-hungry using ridicule as a weapon. True, Malcolm Gladwell’s Satire Paradox holds that ridicule is a distraction that allows the powerful to endure mere laughter in lieu of more meaningful challenges. But what Gladwell doesn’t realise is how a fascist’s hate speech can’t get traction when he’s drowning in milkshake, still less what an unexpected bump the protesters thereby give to local dry cleaners. By eschewing violence, satire can be a win-win.

The most potent act of absurditst symbolic castration came in 1967 when a long-haired Vietnam protestor in a turtleneck placed carnations into the barrel of a rifle of a national guardsman. History doesn’t record whether hippy told grunt “Like, er, free your mind, dude”, but we can hope he did.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A protest by the Extinction Rebellion group in London last month. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

If you really want to stick it the man, though, try craftivism. That’s right, it’s a thing. In 2012, my favourite demographic, Texan knitters, outraged at cuts to Planned Parenthood and other attacks on women’s health services, knitted uteruses and vaginas and mailed them to politicians responsible, such as Texas governor Rick Perry. But let’s not forget the great fails. Plane Stupid activist Dan Glass glued himself to then-prime minister Gordon Brown to stop building a third runway at Heathrow. Vexingly, Brown pulled Dan’s hand away before the glue stuck. Had he not, they might still be a 24/7 item, sharing a bed like a latter-day Morecambe and Wise. Which probably explains why rather than gluing themselves to Theresa May, Extinction Rebellion activists stuck themselves to a train.

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Nudity? I’m no economist, but clearly there is a diminishing marginal utility rate to going naked these days, though clearly no one has told Cambridge economist Victoria Bateman, who has repeatedly stripped to protest about gender inequalities and Brexit. Sometimes London seems full of nudists protesting against something, from thong-wearing environmentalists playing to the gallery in the Commons to naked cyclists on the Mall.

But what if you prefer to drink your milkshake rather than hurl it at passing rightwing hatemongers? Consider emulating what the citizens of Wunsiedel in Bavaria did in 2015. Sick of neo-Nazis annually marching through their town to honour Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess (who was once buried there), they concocted a cunning plan. Local residents and businesses sponsored the 250 participants in the march without their knowledge. For every metre they walked, €10 went to a programme called EXIT-Deutschland, which helps people escape extremist groups. The result: €10,000 to stop neo-Nazis being neo-Nazi. And then a thoughtful citizen showered the marchers with rainbow confetti. When the north-west has run out of milkshakes, it should rise up and give Robinson and his chums the Wunsiedel treatment.

• Stuart Jeffries is a feature writer