You miss the point about American humor. Deployed against such hyperventilating egos, it's a service to humanity and an effective counter to their pretentiousness, their mano, and the legends they are trying to build about themselves, their dynasties, and their dynastic mojo.
Nothing like the cream-pie treatment to bring them down a peg or six. Ever see The Great Dictator? I think you just referred to it, obliquely. Well, Charlie Chaplin's film is now recognized as a masterpiece of counterpropaganda. He pied Hitler and Mussolini both, and it's no accident that that was the attitude the average G.I. took to war with him, when it was time to "go shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch!"
Never make getting rid of those guys into a big deal. Cut them down first -- make it sound like just taking out the trash.
Killing their legend, their mystique, and their hold over other people is better even than cutting their throats. After all, kill one dictator and another takes his place. But kill the idea of a Great Leader, and you clean out the whole nest.
The more specific issue I think though, was that basic, considerate Freeper Etiquitte (and I would hope Jim Robinson would agree) is that when someone starts a serious thread where the intent of the thread's author or contributor (who may have put some initial, difficult and specialized work into it such as translating from a foreign source) is to encourage real FR information exchange, it is not considerate to have it hijacked into the same, very very endlesstired jokes about Korean last names (by people who have nothing substantial to say about DPRK news due to their lack of knowledge and comfort-zone with mere joke after jok), with (an initial) majority of FR thread posters just taking the thread away from it's intial and sincere purpose by the thread author and in some cases, foreign source translator: to inform.
Some people do the same thing when an important story on FR about Japan, for example, Koizumi's statement on the Self Defense forces' deployment to Iraq, is brought up on FR for serious discussion, and then a ton of people flood and bastardize the threat with silly, juvenile endless jokes about "Godzilla" and "Mothra", and plaster manga or comic pictures, when we are trying to engage in some analysis. Why can't primarily joke threads about Asian issues be maintained somewhere else on FR?