As opposed to wannabe tax lawyers? I'll take the comedians thank you very much.

Is dozens of papers per day how academics work? Holy crap.

Notice the word skim. Yes when I'm trying to figure something out I often have 10 tabs with papers open and I'm flipping between them.

Depends. If the paper is dense you're taking hours per paper, rereading many times and rederiving details. You can skim through many you don't want to dive deeply though (if it's a topic you just need a feel for).