An Antic Disposition

This post seems to get a large burst in traffic in December each year, almost entirely based on Google queries for "jingle bells batman smells". Presumably that is why you are here. Let me cut to the chase and give you what you are looking for:

There are several variants of this song. The one I grew up with was:

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

Other reported versions include:

Shotgun shells, Santa smells,
Rudolf ran away,
Oh what fun it is to ride
in a beat-up Chevrolet!

or

Jingle bells, shotgun shells,
Santa Claus is dead,
Rudolf got a .22
and shot him in the head.

or

Jingle Bells, Shotgun Shells,
BB's in the air.
Oh, what fun it is to ride
in Santa's underwear!"

or

Jingle Bells, Batman smells
Robin laid an egg,
The Batmobile lost a wheel,
and the Joker joined ballet , Hey!


Check the comments for other variations. Some have alternate lyrics to the verse as well as the chorus. It would also help my little research if any old-timers (say over 40 years old) left a comment indicated what version you heard first, where you heard (what town or state) and approximately what year you heard it. I'd like to figure out what the original version truly was, and where it came from and how fast it spread.

Also, if you are interesting in crazy Christmas music, then I highly recommend Dr. Demento's Greatest Christmas Novelty CD of All Time. It is filled with many old school holiday comic classics.


That's it on Jingle Bells. What follows is an blog post only tangentially related. You probably won't find it very interesting.

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I’ve been cataloging my book collection, an accumulation of years of book buying by a wide-ranging and impulsive reader. I’m using BookCat from FNProgramvare, a simple program with a killer feature for me — the ability to download book information, including author, title, publisher, copyright date, etc., based on ISBN or LOC codes. This promised to make the work much faster and removed the last excuse I had for leaving this task undone.

Any such cataloging effort inevitably becomes a journey into my past, as I recall when and where I purchased the book and what I learned from it. I also find the most curious things stuck between the pages of the books, old bookmarks from stores no longer in existence, shopping lists, an unpaid gas bill from 1993, a scrap of paper will a phone number but no name. In the end, having the database software did not bring the tremendous performance increase I had hoped for. The bottleneck is not the data entry — it is my day dreaming.

I came across my old copy of David Bohm’s Quantum Mechanics, a well-worn paperback, not pretty to look at. But it is one of my Dover paperbacks, and I keep those. Dover Publications has a special place in my heart. Their paperback reprints of classic texts in mathematics and physics were my constant companions during my 20’s, and were part of something of a weekly ritual. Every Saturday, except in the dead of winter, I would walk the two miles to Harvard Square, go to Wordsworth bookstore (now gone), pick up a new book, and walk across the street to The Skewers (now also gone) for a falafel sandwich, or perhaps to Elsie’s (alas no more) for an Eslie Burger and a knish. I’d eat and read, and then head over to JFK Park (still here) and read some more, and then walk home, or more likely take the #86 back to Somerville.

Helmholtz’s On the Sensation of Tone, Weyl’s Space, Time, Matter and Smith’s A Source Book in Mathematics“, are books I remember in particular. I think I learned more in my years after Harvard than I did when I was there.

So, after musing over the creased covers of my misspent youth, I decided to see if Dover was still around and what they had had in their catalog today. A quick search revealed their online store. I had them send there printed catalog to my home. (Sometimes I need to hold paper). I put in an order and a week later a box of books arrived.

I’m reading now Games and Songs of American Children by William Wells Newell, a reprint of the 1903 edition. I find it fascinating to trace transmission of this part of culture from generation to generation, of games like “Tag”, “Button button who has the button?”, “The church and the steeple” or “Odd or even?” These games are not learned from teachers in a school, or read in a book, or typically even taught from parents. For the most part they are transmitted from child to child, from an older sibling, or a peer, through the most casual pathways. They defied every propriety of authority or hierarchy. Culture was supposed to be a top-down thing, from the elites to the masses, right? But yet, games like this have spread across the country and beyond without any overt effort. In a way, it is like Language.

So, that made me think about the “classic” children’s parody of Jingle Bells, the one with the words “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells/Robin Laid an Egg/The Batmobile lost a wheel/and the Joker got away”. I assume there is no part of this country where these words are not known to every child. But it exists in no songbook. What great rhapsode first sung these words, and when and where was it done? How fast did it travel? I think if a sufficient survey was done of adults of various ages, as to when and where they recall first hearing these lyrics, one could attempt a reconstruction of the migration of this bit of modern folklore. Those who heard it earliest would have heard it closer to its source.