A while back I blogged about the variation of “Jingle Bells” my daughter brought home, in which “Batman Smells” is followed by the strange line “Robin Laid a Gun.” I just noticed that YouTuber Tom Scott has posted a video with a definitive account of the popularity and geographic/demographic variation of many, many versions of “Jingle Bells, Batman smells,” including “Robin laid a gun”:
OK here’s a weird piece of kid culture AB brought home:
Jingle bells, Batman smells
Robin laid a gun
Shot a tree and made it pee in 1981
This dates back at least to 2007 apparently.
It scans and rhymes very nicely but makes so sense at all. What can it mean?
It seems like we are witnessing a kind of cultural hybrid; the “Jingle bells / Batman smells” of my childhood has here combined with a “Jingle bells / shotgun shells” tradition I was unaware of until now, which is actually older than the Batman version. A lot of the “shotgun shells” versions found online involve Santa meeting his death in a hail of bullets, but “shot a tree and made it pee” is not uncommon. I wonder how many utterly nonsensical kids rhymes we know are actually hybrids of different songs, each of which at some point sort of made sense?
Quomodocumque 