SpongeBob SquarePants: Praising the Surreal & Glorious Show 🧽

SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star taking a selfie — SpongeBob and Patrick having fun.

What is an adult man doing watching a kids cartoon?! Well, having a trip into the escapist world of absurdity, that’s what!

Yes, our esteemed editor Mr. Wapojif has been busy of late hurtling through episodes of this most joyous of shows. We think SpongeBob SquarePants is hilarious and offers the dollops of ridiculousness all ages can bask in.

What’s ahead? We’re taking a look at some of our favourite moments, summing up the characters, and pontificating in

The Pursuit of Total Absurdity in SpongeBob SquarePants 🧽

If you’re here, you know what you’re in for. But it’s worth getting a summary together of what the show is about.

You have the main character. SpongeBob is the relentlessly optimistic, largely idiotic, and naïve eponymous character. He lives in a pineapple house under the sea and works at a local fast food joint—The Krusty Krab.

This is in the town of Bikini Bottom.

When not working, he hangs out with his unusual neighbour Patrick Star (a starfish), whilst annoying the heck out of the morose Squidward. The latter absolutely detests his neighbours.

Oh yes, and SpongeBob also has a pet snail called Gary. That little fella meows like a cat (for an unknown reason).

Plus, there’s Sandy Cheeks (a squirrel) who lives in a Tree-Dome. She’s also very optimistic, although is sometimes upset with her friend’s weird behaviour.

With that general set up (and plenty of underlining, continuing narratives), off into episodes we all go for… a rather surreal time of it.

SpongeBob’s Idiosyncratic Episode Structures

A reminder that SpongeBob launched in May 1999 and now, 14 series in, there are some 277 episodes and three major films. That’s a lot of madness!

It’s now one of Nickelodeon’s flagship shows (unsurprising as it’s raked in $8 billion of merchandise), with spin-off films, and video games.

And it’s great to see something so utterly silly be such a huge global success.

The show is just nuts. Vibrant (endlessly so, to the point of near psychedelia), wacky, surreal, slapstick, and deliberately stupid. The various plot threads involve so sort of strange development in the world of Bikini Bottom that SpongeBob and Patrick have to sort out.

That they do in typically ham-fisted fashion, usually requiring a great deal of luck to reach a happy conclusion. You know? Stuff like this!

Some of the most celebrated episodes include:

Krusty Krab Training Video
Band Jeeks
The Camping Episode
Chocolate With Nuts
Survival of the Idiots
Idiot Box
Pizza delivery

The brilliant humour is all packed into quite brief episodes. Usually split across two segments, there are many 11-minute episodes.

Others are longer (and there are the feature films), but one of the reasons the show works so well is through its brevity. If some plot element isn’t working overly well, it doesn’t matter! It’s over in an instant and on with the next daft bit.

Full credit to SpongeBob SquarePant’s creative team.

The show’s creative vision is actually free from written scripts. What they do is establish storylines delivered by premise writers and a team who outline ideas.

Results!? A constant stream of madness and the like.

Despite the long-running nature of the series, we still think even the modern series pack a lot of excellence in.

Compare that to The Simpsons, which is now just a cash cow, or Rick and Morty (already starting to wilt as a concept), and SpongeBob remains serene.

Drifting through it all like a piece of flotsam, it’s remained on the public conscience. And the celebration of the absurd will continue!

Stupidity TANGENT! Is Mayonnaise an instrument? And Other Patrick Star Best Bits ⭐

For no other reason than we think it’s hilarious, we’re including Patrick’s most outstanding line! And it is this…

“Is mayonnaise an instrument?”

Four words with a lot of portent. We’re sure scholars of the future will pour over such a sentiment and consider the incalculable vastness of the cosmos alongside Patrick Star’s brilliance.

Stupidity is a common approach in comedy. It’s just funny.

Heck, we rely on it a lot across our satire (and actively pretend to be stupid… or maybe we just are!?). Patrick is the embodiment of stupidity and he’s all the more fabulous for it.

There have been accusations in recently series Patrick has become too stupid. A bit like Joey in Friends, whose lack of intellectual prowess ramped up as Friends seasons went along.

The process is called Flanderisation in sitcoms, where a defining personality trait is exaggerated. It’s usually a sign of writers running out of new ideas.

We’ve seen the last two seasons of SpongeBob, so can’t comment!

But we do find Patrick still to be our favourite character. As dumb as he is, and obstinate, you can’t help but embrace such a clueless mindset of blissful ignorance.

The Adult Themes Lurking Behind SpongeBob’s World

The show may be completely stupid, but it doesn’t shy away from hinting towards more existential, dark humour. That includes ruminations about the drudgery of working life and death.

It does this in a way that children will be oblivious to it, although may pick up on a few life lessons along the way.

To be clear, the show is all about the giggling laughs for adults and kids. Something which is manages with incredible panache (few shows in history have pulled such a feat off).

But it does have a large amount of advanced language in there which children couldn’t possibly understand. Our theory? The show is, essentially, made for adults—it merely masquerades as a cartoon for wee children.

And yet despite (or, due to) its phenomenal success, SpongeBob SquarePants has kicked up a lot of controversies.

The whole show promotes a liberal attitude and how everyone can, you know, get along so long as we’re not idiotically, pointlessly hateful about simple differences.

This was perhaps best displayed in 2005 when the characters featured in a video where they sung about diversity and tolerance. Some people were pretty gosh darned angry about this.

Doting parents SpongeBob and Patrick take their baby clam for a walk.

The enlightened nature of SpongeBob (in numerous episodes he’s seen happily dressing up as a woman.

As pictured above. In this episode Patrick and SpongeBob take on parenthood upon finding an orphaned clam.

As Patrick is heavily overweight and a bit thuggish, it’s decided he should be the father. SpongeBob gleefully takes on the role of mother) has led some to question his intended sexuality.

The show’s creator, Stephen Hillenberg, pointed out it’s an “almost asexual” and abstract world. But this hasn’t stopped hysterical sorts (mainly fundamental right-wing Christians) from presuming SpongeBob is out to destroy society with its deranged “gay agenda” (we refer here to the podcast You’re Wrong About for guidance on that).

Frankly, how anyone can get themselves worked up about such a fun cartoon is beyond us.

Given a lot of these people rant about cancel culture and the “woke mob”, they don’t seem to realise their behaviour constantly mirrors the moral panics they’ve succumbed to.

And Here’s a Tribute to SpongeBob’s Creator Stephen Hillenburg

Hillenburg studied marine biology in college and, after that, worked in a restaurant as a fry cook and lobster boiler. As you may be able to tell, these experiences fuelled his creative interests.

He continued his studying, heading to Humboldt State University in California as a marine-science major.

As he was interested in animation, he began attending film festivals. And in 1989 he also enrolled in CalArts’ Experimental Animation Program. He started piecing together the ideas for SpongeBob in 1994.

As you know, the show was a huge success! It began running from May 1st, 1999, and continues to this day.

Unfortunately, the brilliant Hillenburg passed away in November 2018 at the age of 57. This was due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which he developed in at some point earlier in the 2010s.

If you want to learn more about that, we can recommend the excellent documentary Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet (2012).

Although Hillenburg continued to commit himself to the show, as the illness progressed he had difficulty talking. He eventually stopped attending the office when his ability to work was removed.

Tremendously sad, but at the same time we must thank him for his efforts.

SpongeBob has brought an enormous amount of joy to the world and we think that should be Hillenburg’s lasting legacy in the decades ahead.

Not least as his creation shows no signs of dropping in popularity.