So, what are we to do? As I’ve said before, humor is an incredibly powerful tool to captivate your audience. You want to use it as much as possible – but use it carefully. If you are going to make fun of a group (or even an individual) do it cautiously – you don’t want to alienate your audience instead of captivate them. 

As speakers, we need to do our best to minimize any accents so as to allow our audience to comprehend what we are communicating.  That doesn’t mean completely eradicating an accent. It does however mean identifying and removing any extreme elements – for our audiences benefit. 

 But how do we go about accomplishing this?

It's quite a dichotomy that I have created here. I started off talking about the responsibility of the speaker to be understood and ended up talking about the responsibilities of the listener. So the question is, "Who is responsible for dealing with the accent?"