The effectiveness of clever on other people is highly contingent on outside factors, over which you have no control and of which you may not have any knowledge; i.e., just because you intended to be clever doesn’t mean you will be perceived as clever, for all sorts of reasons.
Poe’s law teaches us that any satire, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from sincerity.
Or, as John Scalzi puts it:
How “advanced” the satire is is a sliding scale though, depending on the intelligence of the audience.