[floor2]

I'm confused as to how you don't understand that it's a joke.

None of those statements are literal. He does not believe those things. Nobody does. Those statements are jokes because they are absurd, unexpected and ironic.

This is equivalent to somebody writing that "birds aren't real" and people laughing, and you getting upset because birds are real. The absurdity is the humor.

Does that help explain it?

[vba616]

Well, you never know, because people exploit ambiguity or even just blunder into it. Sometimes people don't even know what they really mean.

Going around saying "you idiot, don't you understand the 'use-mention distinction'?" could itself be considered kind of obtuse. In real life, it is not cut and dry. People muddy the water on purpose as a deniability tactic constantly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...]