Some people have a sense of humor. Some people pretend to be using humor, to give plausible deniability to their cruelty. On April 1st, the former group becomes active, and the latter group goes quiet.
This is too noisy to use for judging individuals, but it seems to work reasonably well for evaluating groups and cultures. Humor-as-humor and humor-as-cover weren’t all that difficult to tell apart in the first place, but I imagine a certain sort of confused person could be pointed at this in order to make the distinction salient.
Some people have a sense of humor. Some people pretend to be using humor, to give plausible deniability to their cruelty. On April 1st, the former group becomes active, and the latter group goes quiet.
This is too noisy to use for judging individuals, but it seems to work reasonably well for evaluating groups and cultures. Humor-as-humor and humor-as-cover weren’t all that difficult to tell apart in the first place, but I imagine a certain sort of confused person could be pointed at this in order to make the distinction salient.
I’m not sure that’s true. I think the second kind also uses April 1st as a way to justify more cruelty than usual.