Apology accepted — by the chief, if not by you.Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, has offered a mea culpa for telling a joke to a Marine Corps audience that used the Air Force as the punch line, according to his office.Petraeus called Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz to apologize a few days after word of the perceived slight appeared Aug. 20 on Web sites that follow Air Force issues. Spokesmen for both officers declined to comment other than to confirm an apology was offered and accepted.Versions of the joke — Petraeus used it to warm up the crowd at the Marine Corps Association Foundation’s annual dinner July 30 in Arlington, Va., before launching into his keynote address — have been told for years but rarely by four-star generals with airmen under their command.Within days of the dinner, the Marine Corps Association Foundation and the Defense Department added video of the 30-minute speech to their Web sites and Central Command posted a link to the transcript on its home page.Then, Air Force backers caught wind of Petraeus’ remarks.Quicker than a JTAC calls for close-air support, word of Petraeus’ comments spread — especially after the Air Force Association, a civilian aerospace organization, highlighted the joke in its online Aug. 20 news roundup.“We just reported the facts,” AFA spokesman Chet Curtis said.Curtis added the AFA did not ask for an apology from Petraeus.Central Command’s public affairs office tried to quell the uproar by editing the punch line from the transcript, spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Bill Speaks said. The idea wasn’t to censor the speech but to remove the offending section.“We did not try to hide anything,” Speaks said.Still, the video and the unedited transcript could be found with a bit of digging.Airmen went online to debate whether Petraeus’ remarks were funny or insulting.Most who weighed in on our Web site felt dissed.“Very unprofessional!” posted a reader identified as toughguy. “Perhaps a short refresher at Airman Leadership School is in order for the general.”Wrote mfjdspence: “I wish he would flat out come out and do something that you hardly ever see of a general officer do and apologize for his obvious poor choice in words.”BissBoss, though, sympathized with Petraeus: “That joke was told in good spirit and was a classic example of ‘Good-natured interservice rivalry.’ Give it a rest.”Andrew Billings, an expert on the pitfalls of telling jokes during after-dinner speeches, pointed out Petraeus made two mistakes: The general didn’t seem to realize that his speech was being recorded and he took the point of view of his audience.Billings, a professor of communications at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., compared Petraeus’ second mistake with a state governor telling jokes about only one team in a college football rivalry. Fans of the team that’s the punch line fail to see the humor.“He created an ‘us versus them,’ that he can’t be part of” as a joint commander, Billings said.The Joke“The Marines’ sense of toughness permeates the Corps’ lore as well as its reality.“To recall an illustrative story, a soldier is trudging through the muck in the midst of a downpour with a 60-pound rucksack on his back. ‘This is tough,’ he thinks to himself.“Just ahead of him trudges an Army Ranger with an 80-pound pack on his back: ‘This is really tough,’ he thinks.“And ahead of him is a Marine with a 90-pound pack on. And he thinks to himself, ‘I love how tough this is!’“Then, of course, 30,000 feet above them, an Air Force pilot flips aside his ponytail — I’m sorry, I don’t know how that got in there, they haven’t had ponytails in a year or two — and looks down at them through his cockpit as he flies over. ‘Boy,’ he radios his wingman, ‘It must be tough down there.’ ”Make us laughBust a gut lately laughing at a good joint service joke? Share it — if it’s printable.We’re also asking sailors, soldiers and Marines to submit their funniest stories. Our plan is to publish the knee-slappers in the Sept. 21 issue.And if fame weren’t enough, we’ve even rustled up prizes for the best jokes from each service.Send your entries to airlet@atpco.com.Discuss: Petraeus apologizes to Schwartz