put-on

“People trust me because I’m not a put-on.”

To Finch’s credit, this wasn’t a complete political put-on.

But he writes with sensitivity too, from painterly depictions of the Palm Desert and Salton Sea to riffs on the Talmud that suggest Cohen’s faith isn’t entirely a put-on.

But it was just a tactic — what Kanai called a “put-on.”

He described the unorthodox and at times controversial comedian Andy Kaufman as “the pre-eminent put-on artist of his generation” and “a pioneering practitioner of various cultural trends long before they ever became trends.”