You may have thought of it, you may not. (Verbal ability is one of the commonest sub-tests, after all.) But would you have thought of it in time? Conversations are like FPS or other action games; if you're off by even a little, you're off by a mile.
Suppose it had taken you 30 seconds to come up with that joke - by then the context is gone, the conversation has moved on. People would just squint confusedly at you, even if the topic is still putatively bad translations. (I have done this many times, and am always shocked at how narrow the window between 'wit' and 'non sequitur' is; the very belated version is called _l'esprit d'escalier_.)
It did take me more than 30 seconds to come up with that, and I think the people there will remember the conversation well enough that (if I'd had pancakes this morning) I could make it in class this afternoon to reasonably good effect.
There was some talk here about height taxes, but there's a better solution - redefine shortness as a treatable condition and use HGH to cure it. They even got FDA on board with that, at least for 1.2% shortest people.
Unsatisfactory sexual performance became a treatable condition with Viagra. Depression and hyperactivity became treatable conditions with SSRIs. Being ugly is already almost considered a treatable condition, at least one can get that impression from cosmetic surgery ads. Being overweight is universally considered an illness, even though we don't have too many effective treatment options (surgery is unpopular, and effective drugs like fen-phen and ECA are not officially prescribed any more). If we ever figure out how to increase IQ, you can be certain low IQ will be considered a treatable condition too. Almost everything undesirable gets redefined as an illness as soon as an effective way to fix it is developed.
I welcome these changes. Yes, redefining large parts of normal human variability as illness is a lie, but if that's what society needs to work around its taboos against human enhancement, so be it.