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As of the time this question is being asked, it's the "holiday season," and with it comes the usual choruses of schoolyard children singing this variation of the classic song "Jingle Bells:"

Jingle bells
Batman smells
Robin laid an egg

According to Wikipedia, this version (which apparently has different regional variations) originated, or at least was popularized, in the 1960s. Is there a definitive original source for the song? Was it officially published by DC or did it start as a playground chant?

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    The Batmobile lost a wheel, the Joker ran away
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 9 at 20:15
  • 15
    You try fighting crime all night in a bodysuit with a cowl and a cape, you'll smell too.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Commented Dec 9 at 21:08
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    @ToddWilcox - It's borderline, but attracting only upvotes and is quite interesting. I can't see any special reason we'd want to close it.
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 10 at 4:22
  • 5
    @PaulD.Waite As the Dark Knight parody says, "Really seals in the flavor!"
    – Graham
    Commented 2 days ago
  • 3
    @Valorum I remember it with the final line ending "AND Joker GOT away." (Yes I AM that old.)
    – NJohnny
    Commented 2 days ago

1 Answer 1

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Weirdly enough, Cracked.com seems to have the most rigorously researched history of the song. There have been a number of people who remembered it coming up in the mid-60s in California, possibly partially as a result of the Batman TV show, but the earliest citation is 1967 from the Lawton Constitution, source being an Army child in Belgium.

Image of newspaper excerpt, text quoted below

"American kiddos in Europe aren't completely divorced of the U.S. gimmicked tunes. Li'l Jana Montgomery, daughter of Maj. and Mrs. Ross D. Montgomery, formerly stationed at Fort Sil and now with MAAG headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, warbled this tune during the holidays:

"Jingle bells, Batman smells;
Robin rang away;
Batmobile lost a wheel -- and
Commissioner's stuck in sleigh."

As Clara Díaz Sanchez notes in a comment, Tom Scott did a survey of the remembered lyrics, and found not only a very wide variation of answers, but also that there is a distinct variation in the second line being "Robin laid an egg" or "Robin flew away" between the United States and the United Kingdom. He did not find direct evidence for his hypothesis that the appearance of the song in an episode of The Simpsons influenced the variation, but the statistics are suggestive of it.

Lastly, as others have noted, it looks like the first acknowledgement from DC Comics of the song was Joker singing it in the Batman the Animated Series episode "Christmas with the Joker".

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    The Cracked article does also note that there's an earlier citation of the phrase "Btman smells" and the choice of Jingle Bells (other than the rhyme) may have in part been because, starting around the 1950s, it was a common choice for such parody ditties (admittedly, a lot of them being very racist), being well known and easy to sing.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Dec 9 at 20:28
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    Iona and Peter Opie's The Lore and Language of School Children is a fascinating read, but has no hits for this rhyme in a text search, so it should be after 1959 when the book was published.
    – bob1
    Commented Dec 10 at 0:15
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    @DonatelloSwansino - That's because you're saying it wrong. It's "C'mish-nus"
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 10 at 4:24
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    My understanding is the American/ UK robins are different bird species so why not different versification as well.
    – civitas
    Commented 2 days ago
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    FWIW, @ClaraDíazSanchez and FuzzyBoots, I learned the "Robin laid an egg" version in early grade school circa 1980, growing up on the US east coast. This was shortly after Matt Groening had started his self-published "Life in Hell" comic series in 1978, but well before the early work on "The Simpsons" in 1985. As such, I don't think "The Simpsons" could have been the origin of the "Robin laid an egg" variation in the lyrics, although they may have further popularized it.
    – Eiríkr Útlendi
    Commented yesterday

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