“I am much relieved that telling citizen theatre performers to fuck off is no longer on my bucket list.” Amazing.

In the bizarre ’80s sitcom that is the current Australian Senate, Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm is the foul-mouthed grandpa who lives in the basement, throwing things at the television and making guests uncomfortable with his needlessly graphic recounts of past sexual encounters. He used the Sydney siege to call for relaxed gun laws, his first Tweet was somehow both an endorsement of marriage equality and weirdly offensive, and he wants everyone to adopt quolls as pets. He also just uploads two-minute videos of himself brushing his fluffy white cat to the Liberal Democrats YouTube channel sometimes, so, you know. There that is.

This afternoon Cranky Uncle Leyonhjelm’s ire was directed at a couple of performers from the fictional Flat Earth Institute, who dress up in medieval garb and corner hapless politicians to “thank” them for their old-fashioned stance on things like global warming because Satire. Two of them, Liz Conor and Phil Evans, managed to track down Leyonhjelm at a Melbourne sitting of a Senate inquiry into wind farms, and got about three seconds into their shtick before Leyonhjelm, in true Leyonhjelm fashion, told them to “fuck off”.

Conor and Evans took it well: “We proudly endorseth senator Leyonhjelm’s inquisition into wind energy. It buildeth on our legacy of denying enlightenment and excelling at witch-hunts,” Conor said. “We presumeth that ‘fuck off’ is the customary greeting in the 21st century.”

But never to be outdone, Leyonhjelm used the subsequent media interest to maximum YOLO effect, telling Guardian Australia that “I am much relieved that telling citizen theatre performers to fuck off is no longer on my bucket list.”

To be clear, Leyonhjelm’s obsession with wind farms is kind of weird — there’s no credible evidence to suggest they do anything other than spin around in the wind like those toy pinwheel things, and an inquiry into them is basically a waste of everyone’s time. But if an elevator door opened to reveal two capering jesters speaking Ye Olde Englishe about climate policy at you, you’d probably swear a bit too. In case Leyonhjelm’s stance on fucks and the circumstances in which they are and are not given is unclear even now, behold:

That Tweet is courtesy of Helen Dale, a lawyer — and Leyonhjelm’s senior policy advisor. “Give no fucks” is more than a personal philosophy for this guy — it’s party policy. What a time to be alive.