I may think Boy is much, much better than Pop, but you can't call an album a bad joke when it has incredible songs like LNOE, Gone, Please, and DYFL.
Well, "joke" may be too strong of a term...when I think of Pop I don't just think of the music, I think of the stupid costumes, bad videos, K-Mart and the overblown tour. And yeah, I think all that is pretty much a joke. Bono dressed up as The Fly or Macphisto worked, but only because there was kick ass music to go along with that. With Pop they took it over the top, and didn't have the music to back it all up (as, again, they've admitted many times over the years).
There are a few good songs on Pop, including one of my all time U2 favourites, but as a whole, I think the album is a failure. I don't mind U2 experimenting and going in new directions...they did it with AB and it worked brilliantly. But I generally agree with the band when they said they probably went too far astray with Pop. Being "experimental" and "pushing the edge" is all fine and good, but that alone doesn't automatically make it good music (just as a more traditional U2 record is not automatically good music).
There's less "U2" in Pop than there is in any of their other records, and I just find it interesting how it can be a U2 fans favourite when it sounds less like U2 than anything else they've done. Just too many people involved in that one. Passengers, frankly, sounds more like a U2 record to me than Pop does, and it's certainly more creative and interesting.
Boy's a better U2 record. But since it's a question of art, there's no right answer and it is what it is.