put-on

To do so would seem like a silly put-on — like a weird grief pantomime.

“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.”