Please accept my apologies. And, welcome! I hope to get to know you better.
However,, as others have noted, in this faceless medium, it often helps to provide overt clues to your intent -- just in case others miss your subtle ones -- as several seem to have done tonight....
Peace! :-)
I can have such a deadpan delivery in person, not to mention a knack for arcane references (like Dennis Miller/Mystery Science 3000), that my jokes sometimes get taken seriously. So that can only be amplified in a textual medium. If I have the slightest doubt that my post will be taken as humorous, I'll stick a sarcasm tag at the end. Sometimes, so as not to insult the intelligence of someone who would have known it was sarcasm, I'll put < /sarcasm, in case that wasn't obvious>.
But generally the plain tag (or a ;) emoticon) will do the trick. I think Freepers are a little on edge lately, with war imminent. You can't please everybody, though. The other night, after the State of the Union address, somebody posted a reply in which he used several terms that I wasn't entirely familiar with. No matter how many times I explained myself, the poster seemed to think I was just trying to stir up trouble. So, even being polite and well-mannered won't always keep the wolves at bay. Stick around, at any rate. There's no place on the web like FR.