The Secret History of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells”
Long before there was an Internet to generate memes, weird cultural tchotchkes spread the old-fashioned way: by word-of-mouth. One of the most enduring pre-Internet memes is the bastardized version of “Jingle Bells” that goes
Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
The Batmobile lost a wheel
And The Joker got away
Where the hell did that come from? Brent points us to this article at Cracked.com.
If you grew up anywhere in the English-speaking world (and quite a few places outside it), you heard some version of this parody as a kid. I don’t even remember when I heard it for the first time, but I’ve talked to people in their 40s and 50s who recall learning it when they were kids. This is a joke children have been telling for generations.
When I started researching this article, I came across another writer, Rob Weir. He’d started down the same path, waaay back in the foul, black days of 2006.
