There's a lot of perverse and/or degenerate behavior all through the movie, and it's all the source of humor. (This is a standard approach for (((many))) in entertainment.) The pedo jokes were a little bit funny (for people with a dark sense of humor), but did not in any way make the character seem normal. He just seemed weird and creepy. It felt like more of a wacky warning than a sly attempt to normalize.

For people who are sensitive to even a joking reference to pedophilia, though, I can see how this sort of humor could be triggering, which in itself might feel like an attempt at desensitization. It never struck me that way, but perhaps I just didn't think about it enough.

Is any depiction of something automatically an attempt at normalization of it? I think not, because villains. So what determines whether a given depiction is normalizing or not?