What makes it all even trickier is that it is wrapped up in joking. Jokes can run all the way from light playing around with language, to allowing you to say things that you'd never be allowed to say directly. Where you are on that spectrum can be hard to tell. Often even people who are present will sharply disagree on where a particular joke was on that spectrum. And that is normal people. Geeks are not known for being the best with social cues, even when you don't think about those of us with Asperger's.
Which leads me back to what I was saying. Adria seems to have felt personally targeted. Quite possibly she was. Quite possibly she was wrong. But as long as it is plausible that she was correct, I simply can't support the lynch mob here. Though - as I've said before - unless the man in question had prior history with his employer, firing him was a management mistake.
That said, I've personally encountered more "prior history" cases than managers who would make that bad management mistake. Which says that his firing suggests that there was a prior history. And if there were a prior history, then the odds that Adria was reading the situation correctly go up.