‘A person can stand just about anything for 10 seconds,” reckons Kimmy, hero of Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is back for a third season. It’s a mantra that got her through 15 years in a bunker at the mercy of the “Reverend” Richard Wayne Gary Wayne – leader of the doomsday cult Savior Rick’s Spooky Church of the Scary-Pocalypse – during which she was forced to wear 19th-century dresses and do “weird sex stuff”.

Kimmy’s relentless optimism and can-do spirit remains valiantly undimmed, even after two seasons getting to grips with the real world. Having mastered the smartphone, she is mostly acclimatised to 21st-century life. However, her past comes back to haunt her when the Reverend, who forced her into marriage during her incarceration, gets in touch to request a divorce. In better news, she also lands a rowing scholarship to Columbia University, having built up superhuman stamina during her years spent turning a crank hooked up to the Reverend’s power generator.

There, Kimmy is tutored in the ways of “seventh wave” feminism by her new college chums, who police their peers’ every utterance for perceived injustice. They are also reduced to simpering puddles when a male student, Austin, invites them to an anti-Valentine’s Day party. “He is so woke,” one coos. “The only micro-aggression was when he called us ‘guys’,” another sighs.

Naturally, Kimmy is left tying herself in knots trying to master the semantics of modern-day equality: “Man, you guys are so smart. Oops. I just called you guys ‘guys’. Sorry. And can I say ‘man’? Boy, this is hard. Now I said ‘boy’. Oh brother. Help me!”

After precious little preamble, Austin then presents Kimmy – who, lest we forget, is a victim of sexual abuse – with a consent form for sex. Kimmy may be inexperienced in the business of relationships, but the weirdness of the exchange isn’t lost on her. It takes a night out listening to her new girlfriends quacking about owning their sexuality while wearing crippling heels for her to conclude: “They’re just kids. Tall kids with big words.”

Of course, taking the piss out of young feminists will seem unconscionable to those for whom everything is “problematic”. No doubt it will also be seen by some as a betrayal by the series’ co-creator, Tina Fey, who, in the last 10 years, has done more to celebrate women of all stripes, and point out the iniquities of a system stacked against them, than most feminist theorists manage in a lifetime. Really, though, this makes her the ideal person to boggle at the preciousness of campus culture and skewer young white-girl entitlement.

Even so, it’s a rare series that has the nerve to throw itself so enthusiastically into the political fire-pit. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is audacious satire that, as well as locating the LOLs in abduction, doesn’t shrink from holding contemporary feminists up to the same standards that they demand from others. And crucially, it’s still properly, achingly funny. As ever, discomfort and subversion lie under its impossibly sweet surface, and the smartest gags are the ones that make you feel just the tiniest bit nauseous. Even on a bad day, Fey makes most writers look like toddlers struggling to hold a pen. As Kimmy would say: she’s gosh-darn fudgin’ awesome.