Can paedophiles be funny?

If you haven’t ever heard of Chris Langham, you’re missing out. He was the comic genius behind the toe-curlingly-delicious spoof documentaries People Like Us. In that series he took the role of investigative journalist Roy Mallard, and made “documentaries” about seemingly normal people and situations. It was understated, nuanced British comedy at its best. He was also the awkward sidekick psychologist in Kiss Me Kate which gave rise to what was arguably one of the funniest moments in television — the scene at the end of the series that saw Langham on stage alone in front of an audience attempting a song and dance routine before disappearing down a hole in the stage. You had to be there, I guess. He was also in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Return of the Pink Panther, and multiple episodes of The Muppet Show.

So given that he is one of my comic heroes, I was devastated to read of his conviction recently of downloading child porn, and his sentencing to ten months in prison. Some commentators are outraged at the leniency of the sentence, and they may be right. I can’t think about that right now. I can only wonder if I’ll ever again be able to watch any of his side-splitting comedy, carefully stored on my PVR or in my DVD collection. I suspect not. And I’m not alone, I see. Bruce Dessau raised similar questions on his This is London blog.

Now he’s been found guilty, he’s been sentenced and will spend ten months in jail (well, only five but a jail sentence nonetheless).

This is probably the end of his comic career, which is in itself a tragedy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning his actions. The fact is that the passive act of downloading child porn is not a victimless crime — some child was abused or drugged or somehow coerced into posing for the video or photographs. And by purchasing it (which he did) Langham was part of creating a demand for the material that would make the monsters who made it go out and make some more, screwing up some other child’s life. Sympathy for the child obviously outweighs anything else. But I also feel sorry for Langham, as someone who is clearly in the grips of a disease that no intelligent human would wish upon themselves, and so it’s safe to say is probably out of his control. He maintains he was abused as a child — which may or may not be true and it may or may not explain his paedophiliac nature, without excusing it. I’m not a psychologist so I don’t want to get into a debate on the correlation between the abused child and abusing adult. But I have some sympathy for someone in that position.

And then there’s another debate, put very eloquently by David Aaronovitch in this article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2003. He raises some pretty interesting points….better than I could, so let me quote him:

“No matter how often I turn this one round in my head, I cannot quite accept that thinking is the same as doing. I just don’t agree that looking at child porn on the net is a similar order of crime to creating the abuse and then photographing it, or even to distributing it.

[..]

That’s because there’s something else here too. The advent of the internet and the ubiquity of computers have shortened the distance between fantasy and its expression. This is a very dramatic change. It’s not just about being able to access pictures and stories that once were the territory only of seedy sex-shops (though that’s part of it), or even the realisation that there are people out there who are as weird as you may be. It is the ability, in the most unrestricted way, to explore simultaneously the inner and the outer world.

It is easy to see that this search can be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release. Some ‘perversions’ such as shoe fetishism have always existed and are relatively straightforward, but others are not. These, however, are now imaginable and available. It surely can only be in the age of the web that you could look up the phrase ‘goat-fisting’ and get 81 references. And if you follow them up, are you a goat-fister? I believe that some of those who have sent their credit card details off to child-porn providers have simply lost sight of themselves and of reality, and are actually no more likely to abuse children than any of the rest of us. “

It’s an interesting argument for treating consumers of child pornography differently from the creators of it. In the same way that heroin users might get a more lenient sentence than those who transport and sell large quantities of it. It might be more lenient, but it would still be a sentence. And, when it comes to the purchasing of child pornography, I suspect you’d have a hard time debunking the supply/demand argument. At best you are an accessory to a crime, and that deserves some sort of punishment.

For my own selfish reasons, this all got me thinking about comedy and context. I have no idea about John Cleese’s private life, but I think he’s hilarious. I enjoy Corne and Twakkie more than a vaguely intelligent adult should, without stopping for a second and wondering what they do offstage. For them, the world they create on screen or on stage is enough context for me to relax and enjoy their craft. That used to be the case with Chris Langham, but now his private actions dominate his public persona to the point where it is unlikely one can separate the two. Now that I know that he sits in the glow of his computer screen late at night getting off to images of abused children, I’m not sure I can raise a smile at anything he does on screen. He’s a comedian, dammit, someone who trades in the currency of making people laugh. That doesn’t square up with his nocturnal browsings. Would I feel differently if he were a painter I admired? Or a sculptor or wildlife photographer? Victorian fairy artist Richard Dadd was a murderer. Does that knowledge affect our enjoyment of his work? How about Janet Jackson’s penchant for flashing her nipple? And don’t get me started on her brother….

Look, we all have slight deviances. I, for example, am particularly partial to a gentle nuzzling and licking of my inner right thigh (left if you’re kneeling in front of me). Fortunately that’s not illegal, it doesn’t hurt anyone else, and if I wanted to spend my time and money on a subscription to thighguzzlers.com then I could without worrying about the consequences of getting caught. Apart from a few sideways looks in the gym changing room, but then I’m used to those. And you could quite comfortably read my blog and find it interesting/entertaining/insightful or anything else knowing about my little fetish. In that case, apart from thinking me slightly odd, you probably could quite easily separate out the private knowledge from my public work. What Langham has done, though, is generally viewed as so repulsive by most normal adults that such separation is impossible. And that’s why his career is over. And, apart from my sympathy for the victims of his crime, I have a selfish sympathy for myself and for lovers of great comedy that we’re going to be deprived of his talents in the future, and that his past body of work is now probably unwatchable.