Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy

Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solve and even a cameo appearance by Bart Simpson. 

On a cold winter’s night, not so very long ago… 

I asked the good folks of BlueSky which version of the school playground ditty “Jingle Bells (Batman Smells)” they remembered, and whether it bore any relationship to the one I’d had stuck in my head for several hours already that day, much to my abundant irritation, and which, dating from a playground in late 1980s London went: “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin flew away. Father Christmas lost his knickers on the motorway! (Hey!)”

It would turn out (spoiler alert!) that almost nobody recognised my version—though I did have it attested by a couple of people—but I was overwhelmed by the sheer number and variety of the versions that came like an avalanche into my mentions, so much so that I started noting down some of the variations and then ended up, if I’m perfectly honest, thinking about the whole Batman Smells situation in way too much detail.

As some of you know, I work in lexicography but came to this work via a science background, and it felt very much like what I was looking at was taxonomy: an evolutionary tree if you will, with certain characteristics conserved between different forms of the rhyme, while mutations cause changes which are selected—or not—by the playground troubadours, and die out or spread, to mutate again. Now, obviously like any random sampling approach there is absolutely no way that the list of versions that I collected is anywhere near comprehensive, and the range of contributors is necessarily composed of the people in my wider network on BlueSky (itself famously the social media retirement home of Xennials and their fellow-travellers). That said, I got a good harvest of lyrics from both the UK and North America, along with a handful of Antipodeans (who reasonably enough should have been fast asleep when I was asking), enough, I think, to make a preliminary analysis and draw out one or two interesting trends.

First, let me show you the most ridiculous diagram I have ever made: 

Think of it as a semi-quantitative taxonomy: basically the lyrics in larger type are more common in my data than the ones in smaller type, though none of that is remotely to scale. The two coloured lines through the lyrics represent the most common version from the UK (above, in green) and in North America (below, in gold), with the variations from those clustered around them. If I’ve made the chart correctly you should be able to find any variation of the rhyme I was given by following a route through the available lyrics.

Robin laid a WHAT?

This is the Great Transatlantic Divide. Almost none of my UK-attested versions involved an egg-laying Robin and essentially all of the North American ones did.

“Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg. The Batmobile has lost a wheel and the Joker got away.”

Overwhelmingly my American contributors remembered this version of the rhyme or very minor variations from it. One thing which was really obvious from my data was how heavily clustered the American versions were compared to the UK ones. The vast majority of American contributors in my comments were people replying “Yes, that was mine too!”, whereas the UK versions were much more diverse with most being attested by only one or a small handful of people. If the diagram were to scale the most common North American through-line would be absolutely enormous compared with the rest of the text.

I will set aside the question of poetics here: I’m told that in a number of (particularly Midwestern) US accents the phonetic agreement between ‘egg’ and ‘away’ is a somewhat-imperfect rhyme rather than the absolute mystery that it seems to my British ear. But the dramatic dominance of a particular version, over such a large and diverse country, and over time, seems curious to me.

But before we look at this in more detail, we need to make a little detour to Springfield to visit The Simpsons.

The Simpsons? Why?

Because the North American Standard Version appears in the very first episode of the Simpsons, titled “Simpsons Roasting on an Open, Fire”, broadcast in the US on Fox in December 1989. Several of my social media reporters specifically mentioned this episode of the Simpsons, and it would appear that, at least among the younger generations of schoolyard crooners, there is a belief that this is where the rhyme actually originated. That much is abundantly false, as I have plenty of reports from the 1970s and 1980s which antedate the Simpsons phenomenon substantially.

However: is it possible that the appearance of this particular version of the rhyme in a show with such a profound influence on generations of kids (young and old) may have retconned people’s memories, and replaced different versions they originally knew in their memories with this consensus version? Or is it just that the writers knew the same version as (almost) everyone else was already singing and that’s why it ended up in the script?1

But, one might reasonably wonder, if this is a case of a highly popular media franchise essentially overwriting previous folk memories, why didn’t Robin’s egg, Batmobile’s wheel and the Joker exiting stage right become prevalent in the UK? After all, the Simpsons was (and remains) a TV phenomenon here, too? I have a theory, and it’s a boring one to do with the broadcast environment here compared with North America. 

The first episode of The Simpsons aired on Sky1 (a satellite broadcast channel) in September of 1990. Satellite broadcasting had only really launched in the UK, and it wouldn’t reach its first million subscribers until the following year. It was only in 1996 when the BBC picked up the broadcast rights to The Simpsons that it finally reached a mass audience here. The older series were sporadically repeated but would not have reached a mass audience, and critically not at the time of year when kids would have been singing this in the school yard.

Back up a bit here, how does Batman come into this?

Good question! I’m not a comics historian so I had to look this up. Wikipedia tells me that Batman first appears as a character in 1939, and the first Batmobile first appears by name in 1941. The emergence of Batman as a playground hero—and the particularly camp Batmobile we all know and love—most likely dates from the TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward which first screened between 1966 and 1968.

Looking at the clustering of variations, Americans, generally, seem more faithful to the canon: in addition to almost all the rhymes being Batmobile-related, the other characters that get a mention also come, by and large, from the Batman universe, with appearances not just from the Joker, but from Penguin, the Riddler, and the Commissioner. 

It’s probably not surprising that the Batmobile consistently loses or breaks one or more wheels, the rhyme is a gift, and the mental image is strong: between these two things that lyric is going to be pretty sticky. We observe a rarer but nevertheless persistent variation on the final phrase where the Joker does / takes / learns ballet—and these taken together would be the second most popular N. American version—none of my reporters were able to account for it, but you have to admit that Joker doing a pirouette is a joyful little mental image and a great deal more fun than him simply making good his escape.

On the other side of the Atlantic, not only is there much more ‘biodiversity’ on display with many different versions jostling for position, but the choice of secondary characters is a lot less canonical. I collected appearances by incidental characters including Father Christmas, Wonder Woman, Uncle Billy2, and Kojak in addition to Penguin. These secondary characters and their adventures, where they appear, displace the wonky-wheeled-Batmobile in the third part of the rhyme, though they are often losing important items of their own, often—but not universally—on the motorway (a variation not seen in North America, presumably due to ‘interstate’ being a piss-poor rhyme choice).

The differences between these and the North American versions start sooner though, as in almost all cases in the UK Robin either flew away (this is most common), ran away, or got away. Despite our enlarged cast of characters, by a relatively small margin, the Batmobile losing a wheel pips other options at the post for the third clause. By a fairly narrow lead the most common UK version appears to be: “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin flew away. The Batmobile lost a wheel on the motorway!”

Which, being as it’s pretty boring, and self-explanatory, I intend to say no more about. 

Something interesting we see in UK sources is localisation of the rhyme—absent from the North American versions I was given. So when things are occurring ‘on the motorway’, there’s about a 50:50 chance they’re reported happening on a specific motorway, the M1, the M4, M5 and M6 appeared in my attestations, usually the local motorway to where the rhyme was picked up. A Scottish Batmobile lost its wheel and landed in the (river) Tay. 

While I had very few antipodean attestations, Wonder Woman lost both her bosoms and her knickers (apparently on separate occasions) while flying TAA3. The tendency to lose underwear and body parts is probably best attributed to the fact that bosoms, willies, and knickers are just straightforwardly hilarious when you’re seven. 

There are extra variations which I can only encourage you to scroll around the graph and enjoy, as time presses on.

The one thing I was pretty sure about when I started was that whatever else happens, everyone agreed that Batman smells. 

But before I finish I just want to mention the tantalising possibility of a living fossil…

A living fossil?

Think of a Lamprey. Sometimes as the evolutionary process carries on a species gets… left behind, doesn’t go extinct, doesn’t change much, just sort of hangs around and occasionally bites chunks out of sharks? Living fossil. 

I had a single report of a Batman-free rhyme (the very first thread that separates from the main versions in the chart): “Jingle Bells, [kid’s name] smells, twenty miles away. He made a fart behind the cart and blew up the U S A.”

While I didn’t find a second attestation for a whole version of this, I picked up a UK-based version where, after Robin flew away, he “Did a fart behind the cart and blew up the IRA” (Surrey, 1970s) and a further attestation, after the chart was drawn, from the UK for “Jingle Bells, [kid’s name] smells, let’s all ran away” (Lancashire, 1970s), though the reporter couldn’t remember the rhyme having a second part. There are also sporadic final parts of the rhyme where someone or something ends up in the hay, which makes much more sense in cart-related contexts than anything else.

The original version of Jingle Bells (then titled “One Horse Open Sleigh”) was composed by James Pierpont and first published some time around 1857. It’s a catchy little ditty, and, if you think about it, it’s quite likely that kids were butchering it (and using it for a bit of casual bullying!) long before Batman got on the scene…

***

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, please try not to lose any wheels on the motorway, any rolling in the hay should be strictly consensual on all parts, and anything that looks like it might be Robin’s egg should probably be treated with the same suspicion given to yellow snow…

Thank you for sharing this journey with me. See you in 2026!

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1. This question, obviously, isn’t one I can answer with the information currently at my disposal, and is therefore left as an exercise for some future scholar to pick up. It’s interesting that the same version makes it into the 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series “Christmas with the Joker”. ↩︎
2. The same Uncle Billy, presumably, who had a 10 foot willy? ↩︎
3. A now defunct Australian regional airline which, we speculate, may have been noted for its careless baggage handling. ↩︎

#batman #children #Christmas #folkMusic #history #music #taxonomies #writing