Example: aliens land and you go, “why is everyone surprised? It’s a big universe; we’ve seen it in a hundred movies; law of large numbers; Drake equation; blah blah!” If you aren’t surprised if aliens land on earth tomorrow, your surprised circuits have been fried by cynicism.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/973390998800773120 …
If you’re enough in control to ‘perform’, it’s probably not that surprising. Theatrical surprise (whether sarcastic or kind or whatever) is usually easy to detect and ritually accepted. Undetectably faked surprise is much rarer. It’s a hard emotion to really non-parody fake.