Review: John Dillermand (Danmarks Radio, 2021)
Fig. 1 - John Dillermand (Danmarks Radio, 2021). The main title has Dillermand’s penis extends under his name like a signature flourish.
Animation is usually mentioned in the review section of a newspaper, and non-English language animation aimed at children is generally ignored all together. This was not the case with the new Danish children’s television program John Dillermand, which jumped into non-Danish consciousness in a news story published in The Guardian and on CNN in the first week of January 2021. At a time when people could have read about the ravages of COVID 19 or a mob’s assault on the US Capitol Building, the attention of some shifted to the series of short films created by Danmarks Radio for the four- to eight-year-old age group. The reason for the attention was that the show concerned the misadventures of the man with the longest penis in the world (Fig. 1). The eponymous hero – whose surname translates as Willyman/Dickman – is depicted using his penis as a prehensile appendage – much as an elephant uses his trunk or a monkey his tail – to solve problems around him. John Dillermand is able to walk dogs, raise flags (Fig. 2), tame lions (Fig. 3), steal ice cream, hang on to balloons, pour fuel onto the barbeque, buy sausages (Fig. 4), play tennis with himself and, in the Christmas episode, both save Father Christmas and deliver presents for him. Despite the usefulness of his penis, John finds that his efforts frequently rebound comically and that his penis has a mischievous mind of its own. At the end of each day, he watches highlights of his adventures back home on television.
Fig. 2 - Dillermand and penis raising the flag on Great Grandmother’s birthday.
Fig. 3 - Dillermand and penis taming a lion.
The show is principally the creation of Jacob Ley, an experienced animator whose previous work includes the series Fup og Svindel (2009), about two argumentative miniature characters living in a circus wagon (made at Copenhagen Bombay studio also for Danmarks Radio), and a Christmas film called Den Magiske Juleæske (2016), released in English as Get Santa. His new series is certainly visually engaging. Dillermand is extravagantly mustachioed (and unmistakably adult), looking rather like an old-time carnival strongman in a horizontally-striped, one-piece Edwardian bathing costume and purple wooly bobble hat. The animation uses 3D figures and backgrounds photographed and then animated in 2D. The backgrounds are charming models of streets and parks typical of contemporary Denmark, including occasional Danish flags. It is especially rewarding to see the backgrounds adapted to snowscapes for the Christmas episode (Fig. 5). It is also very funny as the penis snakes its way into unlikely and absurd situations which Dillermand struggles to resolve.
Despite its outlandish premise, the show makes some concessions to propriety. Dillermand’s penis resembles an undifferentiated, undulating, striped hose which matches his costume. It is certainly not the naked, permanently aroused penis of Priapus, the god of gardens, in Ancient Greek and Roman art. The movement of Dillermand’s penis is unrelated to any sense of standard biological function. Neither bathrooms nor bedrooms come into the picture. This penis is innocent and playful. We are told that Dillermand’s penis has its own ideas. It exists purely as a fantasy limb equivalent to Inspector Gadget’s arms. Dillermand’s social context completes his insulation from any inference of sex. Although Dillermand is an adult, his impulses to play are childlike; furthermore, rather than functioning as an independent adult, he lives with his great-grandmother. He is neutered, effectively, as surely as Priapus was by the curse of the goddess Hera: both characters have enhanced sexual equipment but none of the functionality.
Fig. 4 - Dillermand and penis grilling sausages.
As so often in storytelling, the show is both pathbreaking and a rediscovery. Private parts were included in the instructional tales of archaic societies, especially those tales that focused on the communication of boundaries. In this regard, Dillarmand is a learning protagonist familiar from folk tales and fables. Thinking with the genitals or stomach is a common trait of tricksters the world over and, although Dillarmand’s motivation is helping rather than slaking earthier desires, he can be cast as a modern Danish cousin of that archetype. There were scatological elements in some classic texts which found their way to children such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: think of chapter five in which Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the miniature (to him) Lilliputian palace by urinating on it. Such themes and moments did not fare well in the nineteenth century. Between the ribald original tales and modern audiences are generations of folklorists and story tellers – including the Brothers Grimm and Denmark’s own national hero, Hans Christian Andersen – censoring their retellings to conceal (amongst other things) the ribald and scatological (Ashliman, 2014). People being people, such repressed ideas return unrestrained in schoolyard rhymes and blue jokes. Every veteran of a 1970s British schoolyard knows about “My Friend Billy” and his unfortunate interaction with the “girl next door.” A similar theme was depicted for adult audiences in the British satirical comic Viz with the character Buster Gonads, whose “unfeasibly large testicles” had to be transported in front of him in a wheelbarrow; more recently, a version of Buster’s affliction found its way to the world of South Park in the episode “Medicinal Fried Chicken”, when Randy Marsh gives himself testicular cancer (which causes his testicles to become gargantuan) in order to secure a prescription for medical marijuana (Season 14, ep. 9, 31 March 2010). In a more childlike way, John Dillermand steps knowingly back into this territory playing with an idea that has probably already occurred to its young audience members and perhaps gaining extra attention through its implicitly-transgressive nature. An analogous mood of cheeky transgression can be found in the US children’s books and animated motion picture Captain Underpants (2017), which is rich in toilet humor, or the 2002 live action film from the UK about a boy with miraculous powers of flatulence, Thunderpants (2002).
Fig. 5 - Dillermand and penis Helping Santa Claus deliver presents.
There is a story told of the English King Edward III that when a noble lady lost her garter at a dance, he rescued and returned it proclaiming in the Middle French of the day: Honi soit qui mal y pense ("Shame on him who thinks evil of it"). The logic of that remark fits the case of John Dillermand. The reactions are as revealing as the original creation. Conservative vloggers from around the world posting on the story used it as a way to ridicule liberal European mores even as the implicit salaciousness of the content acted as clickbait. Yet there is a problem. The show is true to two generations of Danish attitudes to the body. Representations of the naked body are uncontroversial, and public nudity is common on Danish beaches where – after the Scandinavian winter – the arrival of the sun is too welcome to be limited by clothing. However, just because the show is true to Danishness and makes sense to its creators does not mean that it is a good idea for the Danish state broadcaster to commission the program. There have been other examples of the Danish sense of propriety being different from that usual in other places and raising difficulties. One might think of the cartoons of Mohammad printed by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 or, to give a more historical example, the decision of the Danish arts funder in the early 1970s to finance filmmaker Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s attempt to make a film about the sex life of Jesus Christ. Creative freedom may be a right, but is its expression always wise? This is particularly true at a moment when Denmark is under attack from quarters hostile to its rights-based way of life specifically through the vector of its sexual morality. In 2017, the European Union’s counter disinformation unit felt it necessary to publish a detailed rebuttal of false news stories with the title “No, Denmark is not legalizing sexual abuse of animals” to counter reports of zoophile brothels in the country circulating in Russian media. Child protection is a common theme in such cultural attacks. Danish misjudgment of childcare was an issue in 2014, when Russian media expressed outrage at news that school children had been invited to watch the dissection of a giraffe recently euthanized at Copenhagen zoo. More recent example of foreign critics “making hay” was the case of foreign minister Jeppe Kofod, who admitted in September 2020 that he had had sex with a fifteen-year-old some years previously and apologized by merely saying that he was “drunk and stupid” (Kuznetzov, 2020). The day after reporting the Kofod case, Russian media zoomed in on a story about a Danish TV show aimed at teens which had included adults stripping naked for the purposes of health education (Ekimenko, 2020). John Dillermand was – of course – grist to this same mill. The Russian government site Sputnik lost no time reporting on John Dillermand, running with the headline: “Danish Children's Show About Man with Giant ‘Ice-Cream Stealing’ Penis Sparks ‘Biggest Controversy’” (Serebriakova, 2021). In a world in which Denmark and its values are sadly under external attack, the Danish Prime Minister’s office might wish that Jacob Ley had given John Dillermand a magic monkey tail rather than a prehensile penis. Yet, if Danmarks Radio is determined to steer into and own their stereotype, as least with John Dillermand it is doing so with energy, style, wit and imagination.
The show may be viewed via the DR website at https://www.dr.dk/drtv/episode/john-dillermand_-john-dillermand_227290.
**Article published: March 5, 2021**
References
Ashliman, D.L. 2014. “Censorship in Folklore,” essay online at https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/censor.html.
Ekimenko, Svetlana. 2020. “‘Something Rotten in Denmark’: Netizens Slam Show Where Adults Strip Naked Before Kids,” Sputnik, 19 September 2020 online at https://sputniknews.com/viral/202009191080514108-something-rotten-in-denmark-netizens-slam-show-where-adults-strip-naked-before-kids/.
Kuznetzov, Igor 2020. 'I Was Drunk and Stupid': Danish Foreign Minister apologises for Sex With 15-Year-Old Girl’, Sputnik, 18 September 2020, https://sputniknews.com/europe/202009181080497579-i-was-drunk-and-stupid-danish-foreign-minister-apologises-for-sex-with-15-year-old-girl/.
Pincheta, Rob. 2021. “Denmark debuts new children's TV show about a man with a huge and uncontrollable penis,” CNN, 7 January 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/europe/denmark-john-dillermand-controversy-scli-intl/index.html.
Russell, Helen. 2021. “Denmark launches children's TV show about man with giant penis,” Guardian, 6 January 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/06/john-dillermand-denmark-launches-childrens-tv-show-man-giant-penis.
Serebriakova, Aleksandra. 2021. ‘Danish Children's Show About Man with Giant “Ice-Cream Stealing” Penis Sparks “Biggest Controversy”.’ Sputnik, 7 January 2021, https://sputniknews.com/viral/202101071081689743-danish-childrens-show-about-man-with-giant-ice-cream-stealing-penis-sparks-biggest-controversy/.
Biography
Nick Cull is professor of public diplomacy at the University of California. He is a media historian whose works include Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age (Polity, 2019) and many works on history and popular culture. His work on children’s media include essays on Gerry Anderson and on Doctor Who. His writing on fantasy includes Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction in Popular Cinema (with James Chapman) (I.B. Tauris, 2012). He has been a regular visitor to Denmark since the 1970s. His Danophone wife, Karen Ford Cull, assisted with the translation necessary to write this piece.