It's Okay To Laugh.

 Being mentally about nine years old, I get so squealingly excited when it snows that I make noises only normally heard emitting from a startled BeeGee. Snow is awesome. It's weather you can play with.
 As today was one of the better snow days in recent memory, I took myself and a crack team of blondes to a local park and attempted to build the Greatest Snowman Ever.
 Somewhere along the line, things went a little awry.
 Up to a point, everything was going according to plan, and we had ourselves a pretty kick-ass snowman. Lacking a pipe, I brought an old cigar and added that to the face, and then someone added the blonde wig we'd brought along, and we realised we'd accidentally built a snowy replica of Jimmy Savile.
 It was, to put it mildly, fucking hilarious.
 As sheer dumb luck would have it, we'd decided to build a dual-faceted snow person, so that on one side it was male and on the other, female.
 The female side faced the footpath, so not too many people saw Jimmy Snowvile.
 I felt relieved about this, as people with children (or unpleasant pasts) probably don't see the funny side of Jimmy Savile. It doesn't matter how much I think a snowman paedophile is funny; a lot of people won't agree that there's anything inherently amusing about Jimmy.
 They're right, of course. The things he did were terrible. Except I'm pretty sure we should still laugh at him, in some capacity.
 This is not, I shouldn't need to point out, because I think child abuse is funny.
 What I do think is that it's dangerous and bizarrely empowering to treat Savile and his ilk as monsters. By making them into the bogeyman, we risk making them more than the sum of their parts.
 A large part of Savile's modus operandi, it has emerged, was intimidation. "Don't tell on me, I'm important and well-connected," was his basic deterrent.
 He was undoubtedly well connected, but the ability to threaten only works if people are treated seriously.
 You can't be threatened by a punchline. You can't live in fear of the laughable.
 So instead of treating paedophiles as dark monsters from our nightmares, shouldn't we really be exposing them as what they are? Sad weirdos who should be mocked and shunned. If that happened, they would lose a good deal of their power over their victims. In a lot of cases, they wouldn't get to HAVE victims, as the ability to cajole and pressure tends to dissipate if you teach your kids to laugh at the lonely pervert and report him for trying to tempt them into a van with sweets. They're not criminal masterminds, for the most part. They're just unpleasant nutters who deserve ridicule.
 Sex crimes are horrible. I understand that. But they're made somehow more horrible if the sense of foreboding that the media instills is factored in.
 At the very least, if we're not going to be okay with making jokes about paedophiles (and I'm of the opinion that jokes about anything are alright, as long as they're funny) then we should be talking about them honestly instead of in a collective frightened whisper. Take away the mystique. Make them at worst scummy, and at best a group to be ridiculed as they're led away in chains.
 On reflection, it's probably alright to laugh about Savile.
 It's what he would have hated the most.