You absolutely do not have to RP this. You can say "No." You can say "Ok, you go off and do that, what's everyone else doing?"
Addl wisdom: some people make jokes when they're uncomfortable, as a defense mechanism. If you have a player or players constantly trying to lighten the mood, consider that the atmosphere you're trying to create may not be a good fit for your party, and/or parts of your party may not be a good fit for your game.
You select the level of abstraction for different things based on what is and isn't the most fun to delve into. If your group enjoys poking every surface with a 10 foot pole, it's not wrong to play with that level of granularity. It's just that all the interesting things you can do with a 10 foot pole are pretty mined-out after 50 years so we tend to direct our attention elsewhere.
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I want to see a Trek episode shot like one of those Eddie Murphy films where he plays all the characters, using Jeffrey Combs