At the end of 2019, the Elizabethtown Area Chamber of Commerce was holding a holiday window decorating contest. I decided to enter with this:
Some people got the reference right away, but a number of people were confused. I had to explain that it was a reference to a parody of “Jingle Bells” that goes like this:
Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
Batmobile lost a wheel
Joker got away
I heard a few variants as a kid; sometimes the Batmobile broke a wheel instead of losing it and there wasn’t total consistency about whether it should be “a wheel” or “its wheel.” But they didn’t vary much and all the variants employed the bird pun “Robin laid an egg.”
This parody was well known enough that it was referenced at least twice on “The Simpsons,” the first time in the series’ first episode in which Bart sings the parody lyrics instead of the real ones during his school’s Christmas pageant. It comes up again in the fifth season in an episode that first aired on Dec. 16, 1993, in which Mr. Burns opens a casino. After getting kicked out of the casino because he’s too young to gamble, Bart sets up his own casino for children in his treehouse and tricks Robert Goulet into performing there. Goulet sings the parody lyrics.
It turns out, though, that a version popular in Britain employed a different bird pun: “Robin flew away.” And it turns out that a guy named Tom Scott came up with a hypothesis that British kids who came of age at the height of the popularity of “The Simpsons” were more likely to know the American version of the parody because of Robert Goulet. What’s more, he decided to do some fairly serious research to test that hypothesis. Not only did he confirm it, he came up with a whole bunch of other variants. Enjoy.