Personifying navies to explain treaty negotiations

The skit began as a seminar exercise about the informal conversations surrounding historical negotiations. Students struggled to imagine the sidebar discussions behind formal treaty language, while a real historical exchange would have given them too much of the answer. Personifying entire institutions lets budgets, force structure, and political pressures shape what each character can plausibly say. The later jokes then work as compressed arguments about what each navy needed, feared, and might have said away from the conference table.