Pork & Puppetry

Look, I haven’t necessarily changed my mind about GIMP, the image editor that has something of a love-hate relationship in the open-source community. It’s not quite Photoshop or Affinity. But I do think it makes for very funny comedic fodder.

Which is why last month, when a Social Network-style parody movie trailer surfaced on YouTube, I was enthralled.

It was not only the perfect target for a parody, but its lead, a warthog puppet named Pork Johnson, was just as compelling as the idea itself. In fact, a scene from the fake film, showing the character’s shock as he catches his significant other using Photoshop, only confirmed that this was awesome.

Strangely, its production values completely dwarfed its modest view count—which compelled me to figure out where this came from.

And so I reached out to Dustin Grissom, a director and video editor with behind-the-scenes experience in Hollywood. He describes Pork Johnson as a labor of love, along with an important introduction to puppetry, an artform he hadn’t experimented with previously.

“I was in a moment of time when that creative outlet wasn’t really there,” Grissom recalled of the pig’s creation in an interview. “So I was like, ‘I’m gonna make a puppet, and then once I get him, I’m gonna figure it out.’”

Pork Johnson’s design evokes childhood inspiration for Grissom—he designed it based on a stuffed animal he owned as a child and would make voices for. “I could use him as a way to roast my brother or say things that I would normally get in trouble for,” he added.

In its adult form, Pork Johnson does come across as something of an alter-ego for Grissom, but it’s from the perspective of a pig hoping to make a mark in Hollywood, but constantly facing unusual setbacks and bizarre situations. Think a video podcast that doesn’t go quite right, or a TikTok trendjack that goes off the rails.

(My favorite such example is a video in which Pork prepares to run in the L.A. Marathon, only to break his femur almost immediately after the race began.)

Like Pork himself, the choice of GIMP as a muse comes from Grissom’s childhood. He discovered the software when he was looking for something better than Microsoft Paint, and while GIMP has a mixed reputation among professionals, it nonetheless was full of childhood possibilities for kids like Grissom.

“I may have struggled using it, but part of that struggle was getting me to where I am now,” he said. “There’s a lot of power in being limited with your toolset.”

That’s a mindset that shares a lot with Grissom’s current attempts to get into puppetry, an artform he has gradually learned over the past few years. If you’ve ever seen a documentary on Jim Henson (such as this Defunctland series), you know that pupperty comes with a lot of contortions that are hidden away from the camera. In film and television settings, it’s very much in the practical effects category. Grissom’s Pork Johnson videos represent a sort of on-the-job training in that field. Since starting, he’s learned how to lip-sync and has gradually gained a comfort level with holding Pork. “I feel like my right shoulder has gotten five times bigger just because it’s so difficult,” he said.

Some skills can be learned quickly. Puppetry isn’t one of them. Grissom estimates putting in hundreds of hours into perfecting Pork Johnson. “It’s something you got to really practice and get really good at,” he said. “You can’t take it for granted.”

Putting in all that time, mixed with Grissom’s broadcast-grade production experience and his circle of friends, has created a situation where, much like GIMP, a Pork Johnson production frequently punches above both its weight and its view count.

In fact, the GIMP movie isn’t even Grissom’s most impressive Pork Johnson film on YouTube. That honor goes to “Pork Johnson’s Haunted Airbnb,” a 25-minute comedy-horror film that plays with Johnson’s low-rent celebrity vibes along with ghost-hunting reality TV tropes. Grissom says that film was shot in a 10-hour period, a tiny amount of time for the 30-page script he wrote for the endeavor, but he and his friends pulled it together. “But that was just fun to me and my friends just all night long working on that,” he said of the experience.

Beyond being a way to rekindle childhood inspirations, Pork Johnson is a meta-commentary on the content-creator culture Grissom sees up close. “He kind of naively and very passionately believes he should be a star, should be in movies, should be, you know, this world-renowned entertainer,” he said of his creation.

But it’s the setbacks that make Pork interesting. Much like The Muppet Show leans into the idea that its charm is in being a bad vaudeville production, Pork Johnson’s M.O. is that any success has to come with a setback. In the case of GIMP, his awards play, he learns that his Oscar nomination was a rugpull.

“It turns out he actually wasn’t nominated,” Grissom said. “It was an Oscar Meyer Weiner award that he was nominated for.”

Yes, Grissom and his friends are making art for the sake of it, beyond the more regimented world of film production that dominates his day job, and gaining some skills in the process. (He recently joined the L.A. Guild of Puppetry.)

Given the shake of the dice, it’s entirely possible the GIMP trailer will find additional fandom via the algorithm, or it may be a prelude to a future Pork Johnson hit, like his rendition of “In the Air Tonight.”

But may Pork Johnson, the character, always be an underdog. He’s better that way.