My guess is that it's intended as an example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Then again, nearly every morality-related situation is...
Tit-for-tat in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, specifically. It also poses the question: how good a strategy is it to combine humor with mortal threats?
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.