It's just such a great example of how people could react either with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has been violated and can think that either reaction was the most self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's position.
I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions playing out in real time.