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!