As the great historian of comedy once said, when you analyze a joke the thing that is usually lost is the humor.
I was not actually trying to be literal. I am an American with about half the family roots in Quebec. That makes it hard for me to resist teasing Aussie and Canadian friends about their sometimes latent Anglophilia. Not a knock on the UK, British pronunciation (whatever the heck that is) or any of it's former colonies. More a manifestation of my own Character flaw ;-)
When I taught ESL in Europe, my boss, a Brit, used to say that we were "two countries divided by a common language." That's funnier than it is true. Since I am a terrible speller, I take comfort in the fact that standard spelling is a relatively new feature of English, which went for a very long time without it.
Here in Miami, I use Spanish almost as much as English, and can tell you that the accent and idiom differences put us to shame. They use 7 different versions of "you" with 5 different verb conjugations, and use varies dramatically from region to region... and don't get me started German...
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