ABSTRACT
Playful cleverness is not necessarily irreverent, but can be used effectively to be entirely reverent. Consider the Jewish Talmudic tradition, which takes the text of the Old Testament and seeks to derive wisdom and insight through playfully clever analysis. The ancient rabbis saw themselves not as being disrespectful to what they considered the word of God, but rather bringing reverential depth of human thought to the divine text. Humor acts can have a wide range of perlocutionary goals. Gags are powerful tools; we can use them to advance towards lots of different ends. A joke designed to cause harm should be judged like all other actions that cause harm. Being an impure gag, that is, a joke with a perlocutionary goal other than demonstrating one's cleverness, renders the gag a normal act to be morally assessed in the usual fashion.
