On Wednesday, I sat in a disabled toilet cubicle, listening to a lifesize effigy of the perpetually silenced free-speech crusader, progressive eugenics enthusiast and regular BBC broadcaster Toby Youngs as it lolled back and forth inside a glass cabinet, a fortune-telling puppet at a fair. “Five-months pregnant Padma Lakshmi’s boobs are massive. Actually mate, I had my dick up her arse! Living in close proximity to violent crime is the price Londoners pay for racial integration,” it said, repeatedly. The speech was free, of its original context, and its original audience.

If you accessed any media on Monday, you saw Toby Youngs, who isn’t allowed to say anything, telling supportive journalists about his Free Speech Union™®, a “non-partisan, mass-membership organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members”. Toby Youngs’s Free Speech Union™® is one of 6,764 limited companies run out of 85 Great Portland Street, London. Presumably this is a virtual office, unless Youngs and his fellow directors, including Nigel Biggar, professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, have used the same miniaturisation ray on their company that they have already used on their cocks.

Youngs has been called a “caustic wit” by his friend, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-A-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Johnson.

The Toby Youngs toilet effigy had been programmed to demonstrate Toby Youngs’s caustic wit, which must be defended. But the tape loop jammed. “Five-months pregnant Padma Lakshmi’s boobs are massive. Actually mate, I had my dick up her arse! Living in close proximity to violent crime is the price Londoners pay for racial integration,” honked the torso again, banging its bald head on the glass, Youngs’s harmless comments given liturgical resonance beyond their lighthearted origins.

The word “free” in the Free Speech Union™®’s name refers only to free speech. Membership actually costs between £49.95 and £250 a year, depending how freely you need to speak. If you are a student oppressed by political correctness gone mad, jonesing for freedom, Toby Youngs gives you the first hit half-price. It is not clear if the Free Speech Union™® will defend non-members on principle or members who are, as Youngs says, “ghastly, puritanical, po-faced, sanctimonious, finger-wagging, woke” people or “universally unattractive, small, vaguely deformed” working-class students. It’s a protection racket, capeesh?

He is a tragic fly, floating on flimsy wings of unearned privilege, all the while wishing he were the soaring eagle of legend

I decided to visit 85 Great Portland Street, where companies claim presence from £29.99 a year, to see if the Free Speech Union™® had corporeal form. A disabled toilet cubicle, with a crayon drawing of King’s College Cambridge on the door, functioned as the Free Speech Union™®’s nerve centre. I heard the broken Toby Youngs effigy’s voice before I entered. “Five-months pregnant Padma Lakshmi’s boobs are massive. Actually mate, I had my dick up her arse! Living in close proximity to violent crime is the price Londoners pay for racial integration.”

Inside the cubicle, a brass plate read: “Ask me a question.” But before I could, the flailing animatronic educationalist lurched into involuntary life again, wooden teeth clacking. “Five-months pregnant Padma Lakshmi’s boobs are massive. Actually mate, I had my dick up her arse! Living in close proximity to violent crime is the price Londoners pay for racial integration.” I resisted the urge to cover my ears. The views of a malfunctioning Toby Youngs effigy deserve to be heard. And challenged in robust debate.

Nevertheless, membership of the Free Speech Union™® interested me. Recently, a person called Xpijonipsy wondered on the internet if he should kill me by stabbing my eyes out, shooting off my knees or smashing my brain in with a heavy object. But the first two methods would mean, though blinded or maimed, I would still be able to tell my jokes, as long as I was helped on stage by a clever dog. Will the Free Speech Union™® protect me from Xpijonipsy? Will it protect black footballers from racial abuse? Will it protect feminist campaigners from rape threats? Will it protect female politicians from male politicians who wouldn’t even rape them? Will it protect the “furrowed-browed little soothsayer” Greta Thunberg? Will it protect Holocaust Deniers and Replacement Theorists? Will it protect people from James Grundy’s Lancashire goolies? Will it protect Grundy’s Lancashire goolies?

What Youngs really wants isn’t a Free Speech Union™®. He wants a Freedom from Consequences of Speech Union and a credible-sounding caption for his BBC appearances: “Toby Youngs, Free Speech Union.” But within 24 hours of announcing his Wazzocks’ Waco, his X-Men of Shits, Youngs’s endearingly bumbling Sun interview, in which he wouldn’t guarantee Tommy Robinson’s freedom to speak, exposed his contradictory thinking. Toby Youngs is a tragic fly, floating on flimsy wings of unearned privilege and family connections, banging repeatedly into the same window pane of failure, all the while wishing he were the soaring eagle of legend, instead of something that vomits on to its own food and sucks it back up into its mouth.

Satirising “inclusivity” in 2012, Toby Youngs joked that schools now all have “wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker… and a Special Educational Needs Department”, the latter of which might presumably help the struggling students this government-endorsed educationalist described as “functionally illiterate troglodytes with a mental age of six”.

If I am kneecapped by Xpijonipsy, will Toby Youngs protect my right to speak and my right to use those same wheelchair ramps alongside the “troglodyte children”? I asked the effigy. It answered. ““Five-months pregnant Padma Lakshmi’s boobs are massive. Actually mate, I had my dick up her arse! Living in close proximity to violent crime is the price Londoners pay for racial integration.”

Stewart Lee’s Snowflake: Tornado is at London’s Southbank Centre in June and July, and touring nationally now