People have two main flaws when it comes to listening. The first is that they hear only what they want to hear and disregard the rest. The second is that they don't listen to sentences in their entirety. Instead they listen to key words and create sentences of their own.

One of the most poignant books that I have ever read was Riotous Assembly, by Tom Sharpe. Sharpe lived in South Africa for a few years at the height of apartheid and didn't much like what he saw. When he became a writer, one of the first things that he turned his sights on was the apartheid regime, and the police force in particular. The book is a tremendous farce in which the South African Police Force were portrayed, to a man, as incompetent racists.

But the book was not just poignant. Being a farce, it was incredibly funny as well. Fortunately, the average reader of this book was trusted to put the words 'apartheid', 'racist', 'police' and 'humour' in a sentence in the same way as the author, not in the sentence 'a racist apartheid police force is humorous', and think that such a book is supporting race-based governments. They furthermore realised that just because we were laughing, we were not necessarily laughing along with with the police force.

The same cannot be said of the Australian public. When the words 'child', 'cancer' and 'humour' were combined, the sentence that they heard was 'child cancer is humorous'. That we were not being encouraged to laugh at child cancer victims was beyond them. The creators of the show created a humorous situation by taking a normal situation and making it silly. This has been the basis for fine humour for as long as I can recall. Monty Python were particularly good at it, as were The Two Ronnies, The Office and myriad other shows.

When David Brent made racist, sexist comments and the public laughed, people watching The Office assumed neither that the message of the programme was that racism and sexism are OK, nor that most managers are racist and sexist. The humour came because everyone knew that the comments were unacceptable, and we were laughing at, not with, the perpetrator.

And yet this seems to be lost on the Australian public, or at least on those who objected to The Chasers' sketch. We didn't laugh at the patients at any point in the sketch, and nor were we encouraged to. What we were laughing at was the situation that had been created.

An earlier example of unnecessary public outcry was the nude photos that were taken by a professional Sydney photographer of a 10-year-old girl. Being one of the small minority of people to have actually seen the uncensored photos (a bookshop catering to thoughtful, non-judgmental types operates close to where I used to work) I can see no objection to them. They were not pornographic and neither the girl nor her parents were coerced. If the human body is a thing of beauty, then it must surely be so throughout life, not just at 18 or 21 or whichever other age we arbitrarily decide is sufficient for adulthood. I would describe the photos as art - nothing more and nothing less.

But people heard the key words and put their own sentences together. They heard 'nude', 'photography' and 'child' and then started a sentence with 'Photography of nude children is '. The phrase most likely to end this sentence is 'child pornography', so child pornography is what they heard.

I abhor child pornography and I abhor paedophilia. But the photos were not pornographic, they were artistic. Most of those who were vocal in their opposition had not even seen the pictures in question, and complained based only on their ill-considered expectations, which were given plenty of scope by a few sensational newspaper headlines.

People didn't want to hear that nude photos of children might be artistic. It was so much easier to just classify them as offensive or objectionable and get on with the job of complaining. In short, they heard what they wanted to hear, and they disregarded the rest.