‘We’re taking the show to Dildo’
KIMMEL DISCOVERS NEWFOUNDLAND TOWN
In 1995, David Letterman did one of his best loved bits on the Late Show. As he dialed the number for a little Saskatchewan gas station, he was so excited he was fanning himself with his cue cards and tugging at his collar.
As soon as the manager got on the line and confirmed his name — Dick Assman — the audience exploded in laughter and the music rose to a crescendo. From then on, Assman, who died in 2016, enjoyed a fame that was brief but intense. It relied mainly on his willingness to play along with silly puns and quips about his name, and even to make a few of his own — “Would you like to know how I got a hold of it?” — until the joke went stale.
This week, Jimmy Kimmel took a page from Letterman’s ambiguously pornographic playbook when he took note of the existence of a little town in eastern Newfoundland, name of Dildo.
And just like Assman, Dildoians played along charmingly. After all the attention lately lavished on distant little Fogo Island as a foodie destination, the current rise of Dildo in the American pop cultural consciousness is more than just silly mockery, to which Newfoundlanders are wearily accustomed. It is also a powerful branding opportunity. Sex sells everywhere, no less in a place called Dildo. So when all the townsfolk gathered together for Kimmel’s camera in Dildo Cove Coffee & Krafts to sing their folksong about what Dildo stands for, you could almost see the tourists packing their bags on the mainland, attracted by Fifty Shades of Come From Away.
Dildo wears its good nature on its sleeve, much more than other similarly named places that have attracted the gleeful attention of big city television producers, such as the little Amish village of Intercourse, Penn.
It all began last week when, just as Letterman used to do, Kimmel presented some small town local media, in this case a short television news feature on things to do in Dildo in the summer, like boat tours.
“Pack your things, we’re taking the show to Dildo,” Kimmel said. “I want to know everything about this place. I want to go there, I want to buy T-shirts, I want to meet the townspeople. How did we not know about this? I feel like Canada has been hiding their Dildo from us.”
He got so carried away that he arranged for Dildo to be twinned as a sister city with Hollywood, Calif., and when he learned Dildo has no mayor, he decided he wanted to hold that office.
“I would like to officially declare my candidacy to become mayor of Dildo. I know it’s unorthodox, because I don’t live there, and I’ve never actually been there, but what do you think my chances are?” Kimmel asked the assembled crowd in Dildo.
“Slim to none, because you’ve got to come to Newfoundland and get screeched in,” said local council member Andrew Pretty.
“OK I didn’t understand any of that. Can someone translate for me,” Kimmel said. (Pretty was referring to the famous tradition of kissing the cod and getting drunk on screech.)
He offered up the best gags his writers had come up with: a proposal for donuts called Dildonuts, a seek and find book called Where’s Dildo, a T-shirt that says “There’s a Little Dildo in Everyone.”
“I will get things Dildone if it’s the last thing I Dildo for your town,” Kimmel said.
He made sport of one of the townspeople, Jonathan Butt, who told Kimmel he had no idea how many Butts there are in Dildo.
“I imagine all of them,” Butt said, gnomically.
The origin of the name, and whether it is related to the sex toy, is a matter of some dispute. The name is recorded as early as 1711, and the town was settled in 1775. Dildos have been around much longer.
One speculation is that the town’s name is from a shrub called a “dildo-tree,” another is that it has Spanish origins from long ago sailors, or that it comes from the name of a phallus-shaped peg to secure an oar on a rowboat.
St. John’s city council in the early 1980s started naming streets after villages but backtracked on Dildo Place after residents complained. Later, residents of Dildo voted on a name change, but rejected it.
So the persistence of Dildo’s famous name has come to be a case study in refusing to be embarrassed, even when people are openly laughing at you.
As John Reid, a jovial local man who wrote and sang the Dildo song, sang for Kimmel: “D stands for our dignity, our name will never change. I stands for the innocent child who should never feel ashamed. L is for liberty, D for days of old, and O spells out the loving word that we all call Dildo.”