What unsettles us is not the cleverness of the jokes, but their accuracy. The third pig’s “water” gag is only funny because we recognize the trick: we, too, hide sharp intentions behind disarming smiles, waiting for the moment we can say, “What? I was just playing.” The distance between who we appear to be and what we quietly calculate is where the laughter lives—and where it stings.
The farmer’s dilemma exposes the same fracture at scale. His desperate “fairness” feels like so many policies, apologies, and payouts we see every day: solutions that obey the rules while abandoning the spirit. We chuckle because it’s absurd; we wince because it’s familiar. These stories linger as a mirror we can’t quite look away from, asking us whether our own performances of fairness are any less theatrical than the jokes we so easily applaud.
