Just because you didn't get the joke doesn't mean he did it wrong. I got the joke, and he was saying it to me, so I believe the joke was performed correctly, given his target audience! ^_^

The problem, I'd say, would be an assumption of shared prior experience - but humor in general tends to make that assumption, whether it's puns which assume a shared experience with lingual quirks, friend in-jokes which are directly about shared experiences, or genre humor which assumes a shared experience in that genre. This was genre humor.

While transparent communication is wonderful for rational discussion, I would conjecture that humor is inherently about the irrational links our minds make between disparate information with similar qualities.