Sarcasm

I read somewhere that the rest of the world struggles with the British sense of humour and our love for sarcasm and irony. As a result I conciously try to avoid using sarcasm when I'm talking to people whose first language is not English. I just cooked a pizza and carried it up the stairs to my room where I bumped into my Italian flat-mate who laughed and said "Wow, that's the biggest pizza I've ever seen!"

I looked at him blankly and said "what're you on about?!"

"I was being ironic" was his reply. It suddenly occurred to me at that moment that I just wasn't expecting sarcasm from an Italian. If one of my British flat-mates had said the same thing I'd have realised straight away that they were being sarcastic, but because he is Italian I simply was not expecting a sarcastic comment for him.

Or maybe it's just the lack of sleep...