And the other Royal Navy tradition: Captains are inviolate commanders, at all times in all settings. They present "serious". They eat and drink separately from the crew. They have only three or four other officers that they ever get to, comparatively, relax with.
So, you have a comedy officer, and you have a captain, and the captain simply looks the other way when the comedy officer is up to their hijinks.
He *knows* the hijinks. He *sees* the hijinks. But he pretends not to.
@[email protected] Fun fact: my mother has expert card shuffling skills because as the daughter of a merchant navy captain she was one of the only people the sailors trusted to deal for money games in or out of port (she would have been around 10 at the time and didn't normally travel with the ship). The captain, of course, couldn't be involved but the crew preferred having relatives of the captain run the game than the local casino.