This is exacerbated by the actors' cloth-eared delivery - stresses invariably in the wrong places render potentially hilarious lines peculiar and baroque.
Even the cloth-eared Alf picks up on the situation.
He didn't make that mistake because he's stupid, or cloth-eared.
Only the churlish or cloth-eared could deny this music's uplifting qualities.
He, being a cloth-eared idiot, always assumed that Norm was American.