This would have been a talk that I gave at
a live show with an audience, but it's June 2020 as I record this, so instead, I am at home, talking to my camera, and possibly my neighbours
if they can hear me, and also cursing the drivers with loud engines
who seem intent on making as much noise as possible directly
outside my flat today. I asked 64,000 people about the children's rhyme
"Jingle Bells, Batman Smells". And here is what I found out. When I was a kid, the next line of that
was "Robin flew away". That was how the song went in my school.
No more lines. Turns out there are multiple completing versions,
including the one that singer and actor Robert Goulet sang
on the Simpsons in December 1993. That version goes, "Jingle Bells, Batman smells..." "Flew away" versus "laid an egg".
Two different bird jokes. And here's the hypothesis that I want to test: that the Simpsons measurably changed which
version of that song was popular. That kids who saw that episode,
either when it first aired or in reruns, either learned it for the
first time from there, or it replaced the version they knew. Because, according to various pop histories, that song was around for decades
before the Simpsons. It probably started in California in the 60s, inspired by the Adam West Batman TV series,
then it was spread by military kids moving around America and the world
with their families. Probably. There are other Jingle Bells parodies, including some really genuinely awful
bigoted ones, I am not considering them.
I'm asking, very specifically, about the one where Batman smells. Never mind that it's entirely
the wrong part of the year. It's 2020. Time is meaningless.
Let's talk about Jingle Bells in the middle of summer. So. I sent out a survey. First, I asked each person for
two bits of information: the year they were born, and the country
they were in when they were eight. I figure eight years old is about
the right time for a kid to be endlessly singing this at their friends
in the playground. Now, if the person answering said they were
from the US or UK, I asked for their zipcode,
or the first part of their postcode, from when they were a kid. That meant I could very roughly put a pin
in a map for each of them. And there are those pins, thank you very much
to everyone who responded. And then, I asked two questions: first, what they called the
most basic playground chase game, what Americans call "tag", and then second, to complete the song:
Jingle Bells, Batman Smells. For both those questions,
I didn't offer any suggestions, I didn't want to prompt with any words that
might make people go "oh, yeah, sure, that one I guess?" They had to remember. Which was probably a good idea, but it meant that sifting through this data
was a nightmare, because give people a blank text box and some of them will decide to tell you their
life story in it. In the analysis, I only included respondents
who used the word "Robin" in their answer. That's because for the first couple of hours
of that survey being out, I hadn't made it clear that you could just
leave that answer blank if you didn't know. So quite a lot of people who didn't know the song
interpreted the question as "make up some lyrics of your own".
That's my bad. I suspect a few people back then
also Googled the answer, but I don't think that'll have affected the
final results all that much. That also removed people who were just quoting
either Spongebob Squarepants or Madagascar. Those versions were just invented by scriptwriters
and forced into kids' heads by marketing. I don't want to count those here. I was going to filter out anyone who didn't
use either "flew" or "egg", but it turns out more than 1,000 people know the
next line of the song as "Robin ran away"? I think if you don't have a bird pun in that line,
you're missing out, but who am I to judge? I also filtered anything that was obviously
spam or malicious. When all that was said and done,
once all that filtering was finished, I had answers from 42,886 people who knew
some version of the song with "Robin". Here's the breakdown by year of birth,
and by geography. Now, while I'm still counting answers from
earlier years, I'm only going to show graphs from
1973 and onwards, because those are the birth
where I have more than 50 replies from both the US and UK. The graphs get weird before then,
and I think that's because the number of people who put in
false birth years starts to have a really significant effect. I also can't collect data from anyone born
in 2007 or later, because the law's very strict on collecting
data from kids under 13. So with all that in place, I tracked keywords
for the various versions of the song. If you had a completely unique version,
I wasn't going to count it, because it might contain personal information. Shoutout to the one person who was insulting
their siblings in their answer, at great lengths, and also explained all the jokes. But if a few people had roughly the same version,
I did include a check for it. So. Let's talk about those many other variants. I'm not musical, and frankly, singing a half-dozen
ridiculous versions of Jingle Bells sounds like something that will
very much come back to haunt me, but I do know someone who can perform these
far better than I can. Jack. That version was only sent in by a few Australians, but also two people from
north-west Washington DC. So maybe they were diplomatic or army kids?
No idea. Oh, and in other versions of that, it's Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse
doing the stabbing. Because children are monsters. And on that note,
let's cover the thirty-nine people, again, from all over the world, who all share this second verse. That was one of the less violent
versions of it, one ends with a request to be
shot in the head. Now, like I said, I did rule out any answer
that didn't include Robin, but I do want to highlight just one
international version of Jingle Bells, just to show that this is not entirely
an English-speaking joke. Sweden has many variations on this: The colour and particular private part of the bear
that's painted appear to change between people. Now we get to the most common versions. One is almost exclusive to the UK
and New Zealand, because those are the countries that use the word
"motorway" for big highways. More than two thousand people
have some variation on this: There are a long cast of characters, all of whom lost some usually-intimate part
of their body or clothing, on various motorways that change depending
on where in the UK you are. In south Wales, it's "on the M4 motorway". In Scotland, the M9. 62 people, almost all Australians, said the
last line of that should be: TAA being a now-defunct Australian airline. However, that is better than the two Scottish people
who said it should be: And the idea of 90s kids-TV
fever-nightmare Mr Blobby just defecating in the middle of the-- --I can't say that! Then there's this one from 221 mostly-British
people, where after Robin flew away: And then from 23 British people,
mostly 80s kids: Kojak, fictional TV detective with a lollipop
part of pop culture in the UK in the 80s. Again, British, more than 100 people. Version after version after version of the
song came up as being popular over here but not in the
US or Canada. There was only one significant variant
I could find that was definitely North American: More than 1500 people know that version, including more than 15% of the
Canadians who replied. Almost no-one outside North America
has heard it. There were a couple of smaller American variations. 90 people, with a big cluster
in the Pacific Northwest. The exact year changes, but almost everyone
in that group agreed that Robin "laid" the gun. And the final North American variant is: Which just seems a bit half-assed, frankly, like it got made up by a parent trying to give the kids something
more wholesome to sing? But it was only 35 people. America seems to have way fewer regional variations
than the UK, and I have no idea why. That doesn't just happen for songs, either. In this book from 1959,
"The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren", Iona and Peter Opie conducted a survey of
dozens of schools in Britain, asking about the words and rhymes they use. It is a famous piece of research, but it's also a catalogue on how
children are really cruel to each other. There's a whole chapter in here on
nicknames and epithets, and I'll just read from the
table of contents here: they have a list of names for
Spoil-sports, Sourpusses, Spitfires, Clever-dicks, Dafties, Fools, Dunces,
Copycats, Gibbers, Cheats, Swankpots, Nosey Parkers, Stare-cats, Cowards,
Crybabies, Sneaks, Crawlers, Bullies. Plus, there's a whole section on
"tortures and hair-pulling", and a separate chapter on
physical appearance insults. Children are monsters. Anyway, what this book also has are maps. They're the best known bit: this old copy here
actually has its spine broken on one of the map pages,
presumably because someone photocopied it. This map covers "truce terms", the words that
kids use to say that they are temporarily out of a game,
because they've got stitch, or they're tying their shoelaces. In the UK, those words change not just in
different parts of the country, but even from one town to the next. And that's why I asked about the game that
people call "tag". Because if you're American,
of course it's called tag, more than 96% of Americans and Canadians replying
said it was called tag, and almost everyone who disagreed misidentified
a different game and wrote something like "hide and seek", maybe because they didn't think I'd be asking
such a simple question. In America: it's. called. tag. In Britain, only 29% of people
called it tag. Not only are there different names,
but just like the Opies did for truce terms, you can draw a map of what
"tag" is called around the UK. For some reason, America tends to be one massive,
homogenous blob, even for games and songs that are made up
more recently, whereas Britain has loads of variants. Which brings me, finally, to the big question. Is it "laid an egg" or "flew away"? And did the Simpsons change it? So first of all, let's compare the basic numbers. Now, all I'm doing here is showing the percentage
of people who said "laid an egg" out of all the replies who knew
some version of the song. And you can see, "egg",
by far the most popular. 78% said it's "egg".
So it seems like there's a clear winner: until you break it down by country. More than 98% of Americans
said it was "laid an egg". 98% percent! You can't get 98% of Americans
to agree on anything. Of course the Simpsons chose it. Only someone who grew up outside the US would
ever think that sounds wrong. But "Robin flew away" is clearly
the British version. But remember, the answers were also
broken down by year of birth. For the US, it's always a very high percentage,
of course. But if the Simpsons had an effect in the UK,
then we'd expect to see that 90s kids, which means people born from the early eighties
onwards, they would be more likely
to know the "egg" version. And I wish, I wish, I wish, I had a camera
on my face when I first saw that data. I could not ask for better proof of that hypothesis. Can I 100% trace that back to the Simpsons? No, of course not,
there could be some other factor. But the Simpsons was one of the most important
pop-culture shows in the UK in the mid-90s, a lot of folks will have seen that episode, and I cannot think of any other reason for
that change. And it also explains why the change happens
everywhere in the UK at once: this isn't a local version that spread outward
from a single location, it's a version that appeared everywhere, probably because it was imposed by television. And as the Simpsons drifts into history, as kids aren't watching it any more, the British versions of the song
are reasserting themselves. Yes, America, Robin might well lay an egg for you,
but over here? He flies away. - Thank you, Jack. - Thanks! Today's sponsor is... - No!
The 'tag' name and 'Safe' name for me was "Tig" & "Skinch".
The map had it spot-on.
Wow the amount of work that went into this is crazy.
The regional breakdowns being different in the UK but so homogeneous in the US is fascinating.
I love linguistics shit like this way too much. Brilliant stuff
Interesting he attributes this solely to the Simpsons. I specifically remember hearing it from The Batman Animated Series, one of the first episodes 'Christmas with the Joker' used the 'Robin laid an egg' version of the song. That episode aired on November 13, 1992
EDIT: Found a clip of it here
So, I went to elementary school in San Francisco in the early 80s. We all sang the “egg, lost wheel, joker got away” version. This was pre Simpson’s, however, Matt Groening was living in my neighborhood and writing his Life In Hell strips at the time.
I have no way of knowing if these are related.
What a video. I didn't know it but I'd watch an entire series on this kind of research on Simpsons impact on culture.
"accumulative heat map of egg responses"
I did not realize how much analysis of "Batman Smells" there is out there and I'm going to stop this madness right now.
Batman had "swamp butt."
So once our primary school head teacher had the idea for us to all sing jingle bells one christmas, my and my friends had the funny idea to sing the parody version instead, good plan so far but the problem was absolutly every other child in that room had the same idea.
The entire assembly of about 250 children got as far as "uncle billy" before noticing our underestimation of how many people would sing thatt version and we all went quiet almost in unison.
The head teacher was not happy