We play rugby. It is a scurrying game of fanatical intensity, which hisses, hooves, splutters and splatters its way across the paddock. The most homophobic of men call so-and-so a good bugger - it's perversely laughable.
And we play and love rugby. It's brutal, carnal but also enticingly exciting and liberating.
To see a wing dash for the corner and dot down, being chased haplessly by a, frankly, fat prop is adrenaline-pumping and hilarious. A scrum is bananas. It's not going anywhere, it implodes in a tractor heap.
We have bold blokes taking out fishing boats with no qualifications. Tiger Woods was only good when he had one of us caddying for him. We eat sausages, bread and onions outdoors and marvel at our way of living. Our most intelligent women pronounce the word women "woman"; our men mumble.
New Zealanders make jokes in bad taste at the expense of large Catholic families. Our cafe culture is alive and well, unless you want coffee after 3pm, when everything shuts down like a factory. Our biggest city is longer than Los Angeles, more expensive than Geneva and boasts its most expensive suburb as an inland, creek-riddled hill called Remuera.
We New Zealanders, rather amusingly, don't feel our words. "All good here" means "I'm having the time of my life in magical Venice". Or "My day was okay" translates to "My house burnt down".
And, if we're honest, with more than 1600km of coastline, our national symbol is really the goddamn seagull.
Some of our policemen are the funniest men in the world. The clip where the policeman says, "Always blow on the pie. Safer communities together", really had me reeling. And I'm a try-out stand-up comedian.
In addition, I've been misled into ladies' toilets by an off-duty cop and saw another actually pick up a swan. The whole bay laughed uproariously at the mayhem.
The only funnier people I've encountered are Fijians and truck drivers.
Jem Bedoo is amused, frequently.
