How did a 150 year old secular Christmas song become so strongly associated with a character attack on the caped crusader?

I’ve been reading about it on Wikipedia, and I note that there appears to be two main versions of the parody.

The one I learnt at school – the one I assume is the English version – goes:

Jingle Bells, Batman smells
Robin flew away
The Batmobile lost a wheel
And landed in the hay.

I first heard the version that I assume is the American one on The Simpsons. (This one is quoted on Wiki.)

Jingle Bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
The Batmobile lost a wheel
And the Joker got away.

The American version scores in that another character from the Batman stories gets a mention, but is otherwise pretty lame to my ears. This is partly because “away” doesn’t rhyme with “egg”, and partly because in the UK we don’t much use the term “laid an egg” to mean something isn’t very good.

Any other versions/theories?

My suspicion is the Joker himself coined it.

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

I recall a version from my childhood that went:

Jingle bells, Santa smells,
Rodolph laid an egg

Luckily I don't remember the rest. And no, I can't explain it (like why a reindeer lays an egg).

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One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
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In college we sang the fourth line as, "before they tapped the keg, Hey!"

That solved a lot of problems. Solves the rhyming problem, too.

The second time through it was, "so be sure and break a leg."

Come to think of it, it was high school, not college, and was at the drama club parties.

The version I learned went:

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Yes, sometimes the last line is rendered "And the Joker learned ballet, hey!"

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You know, this is real folk music. Not some guy in a flannel shirt and blue jeans strumming on a guitar. This. Passed down through the oral tradition, changed and mutated by the percipients and listeners, This song is barely two generations old at best, and yet there is already a number of different versions. It is just fascinating.

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Let's not forget the Apollo 8 Week version of "Jingle Bells":

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Well, there's also "...and Joker played ballet". The last line varies quite frequently.

An occasional second-verse is:
Batman's in the kitchen
Robin's in the hall
Joker's in the bathroom
Peeing on the wall

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I assume that's a serious question, but I think the answer simply is that children like to take songs that they know (including traditional songs) and change the lyrics to make them funny. I don't think there's anything special about Jingle Bells or Batman in that regard.

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As above, so below

Where do you think those people got their songs? There are literally hundreds of versions of some of the songs that became hits in the Sixties.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

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T. Anderson

Jingle bells, go to hell
Shove it up your sleigh
I'm completely ticked off
By this humbug Christmas day.

GB ~1970

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"Everybody's playing the Game
But nobody's rules are the same
Nobody's on nobody's side." (Tim Rice)
No matter how strong, or brave, or pure of heart you may be; sometimes the dragon wins!

Not just Jingle Bells!
Nor even Christmas carols. To the tune of Allouette:
Children do not care about taste or political correctness. Grown-ups aren't much better. There's a parody of the Colonel Bogey March (also known as the theme from Bridge Over the River Kwai) that I believe was popular during World War II that I just cannot quote here because of the subject matter.

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Now I remember. Ca. 1957, I'd say:

Jingle bells, Santa smells,
Easter's on the way!
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a souped-up Chevrolet

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Making Christmas songs into something that will make you giggle (or at least grin dirtily in remembrance of when it was funny) whenever you hear them isn't necessarily an english-language only tradition. I can think of a bunch of German ones we "adorned" in similar ways.

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Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

One I recall from around the 4th grade (1978?) was:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured every teacher and we've broken every rule
Now we're marching down the hall to hang the principal
Our troops are marching on.

Glory, glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Hid behind the bank
With a US Army tank
Teacher don't teach no more.

And people blame games for the stuff kids come up with.

Paul- The batman version I learned was the American one you listed. The thing is, and it may be an accent thing, "laid an egg" is actually sung more like "lay danegg". It does rhyme with away the way I learned it.

I think the whole thing comes down to parody. When done well, it can be really good. Kids know simple songs, and want to make a funny song like the ones they hear, so they take the songs they know and apply words and themes that they know. I don't know when that Batman version got legs, but for a kid, adding a comic theme to a song that was as simple as "Jingle Bells" doesn't really surprise me much.

When I was a teen, we converted "Shut Down" by the Beach Boys to "Shot Down" about a dogfight between an F-16 and F-4. Another friend came up with "I want my K-F-C" to Dire Straits' "Money for Nothin'"

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I never heard that, but found it on Wikipedia of all places. I knew a different version of the song, though, about Comet (a cleanser).

Comet, it makes your teeth turn green,
Comet, it tastes like gasoline,
Comet, it makes you vomit, so get your Comet, and vomit, today.

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As above, so below

There is an old song that goes It itself a variation riddled song. However in my mothers day, they would replace ear with boob for instant childrens giggle fest.

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Jingle Bells, shotgun shells,
Grannie's got a gun.
Oh what fun it is to see
Grandpa on the run!

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A variation I made up myself. Guess the original.

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Oh good, it hasn't been done yet:

Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin laid and egg
Blows his nose in Cheerios
And eats them right away

The second line doesn't look right, but the last two are correct.

Another one (to the tune of "This land is your land, this land is my land...":

This land is my land
It is not your land
I've got a shot gun
You don't got one
I'll blow your head off
If you don't get out
This land was made for me not you.

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

I remember that one! And still think of it when I scour the sink, too.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

And the definitive classic,
Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts.
And then there is one that my mother taught me.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

The Gopher Guts version I know isn't listed on the Wikipedia page (though it is very similar to several versions there). And I know I somewhat different version of the steamboat one:


As I recall, this was a rhyme used in a game that involved a lot of coordinated clapping and hand-slapping with another person..

Or:
Batman's in the kitchen
Robin's in the hall
The Joker's on the tennis court
Losing to the ball.

Over on MuseBlog, we modified Tom Lenher's "Wernher Von Braun" to be making fun of Doctor Doom.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

The last line in my childhood years was:

"And Alfred lost a leg."

No meaning to them; just nonsense lyrics made up by kids. The high point of the commercialism of this genre has to be "Pornographic priestess, crabalocker housewife . . ."

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

There's a Straight Dope about it, too, analyzing some of the possible historical accuracy of it.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"