[BarjackU977]

Sailor Steve,

I get your point.
And with this one type of humor, the question remains: where is the border between "having fun" and "making fun of" (mocking).

It's at a different level for each person. It varies with the mood of the day. It depends on the perception of "balance", on personal experiences, on the context, on the "quality" of the joke. It's easy to take this type of joke as a joke one time, two times, three times, but the higher it goes in frequency, the higher the chances are that the target gets tired about the joke. Especially when people who really mean to insult happen to come along (and since the 2nd war in Irak, I came across a certain amount of such people), which was hopefully not the case in this topic.

I think it's nothing new for any of us. It's a debate many others had before.


Jimbuna,
other comments included, for example, that the Roman empire didn't have its border stop to Italy and France but that they included England as well, that the USA also took its troops back from Vietnam and things like that. There is no point, since you meant to joke.
But thus, it's not about me having a personal difficulty in understanding or about an inability to embrace the meaning of a joke, it's rather about the context and the other above mentioned reasons.
And yes, like MikiBzh said, having different cultures and languages can also cause misunderstanding.