Here’s Why ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Doesn’t Make Too Many Topical Jokes
The day some landlubber drops their iPhone in the ocean for it to float down to Bikini Bottom will be a darker one than when the Hash-Slinging Slasher came to town.
SpongeBob SquarePants turned 25 years old this past May. During his quarter-century at the forefront of Nickelodeon programming, Tom Kenny’s beloved, boxy and endlessly upbeat fry cook has remained largely unchanged, with the exception of a brief animation “glow-up” that left the redesigned hero looking a little too much like a SpongeBob plush doll than SpongeBob himself.
Though most of the fans who fell in love with SpongeBob SquarePants during its first few seasons on television probably aren’t religiously keeping up with the show through the modern day — much like how we don’t eat Totino’s Pizza Rolls as often or own as many Tech Deks as we did back then — the OG fans will be relieved to hear that new SpongeBob SquarePants episodes aren’t desperately pandering to the current generation of children with hackneyed pop culture-inspired plot lines or entire episodes devoted to Skibidi Toilet.
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In a recent interview with Variety, SpongeBob co-showrunner and executive producer Marc Ceccarelli clarified that the reason there hasn’t been a SpongeBob episode about TikTok or Taylor Swift is because series creator Stephen Hillenburg wanted Bikini Bottom’s only interaction with our world to be through our ocean junk that floats down to the floor.
Tell that to David Hasselhoff.
As Ceccarelli explained, the philosophy in the SpongeBob writers’ room has always been to avoid episode ideas that would date the series, which is probably why their early work still holds up as absolute peak TV comedy, let alone peak kids’ humor. To that end, the canonical seclusion of Bikini Bottom is a foundational piece of lore.
“Everything since the dawn of Bikini Bottom is made of a bunch of old junk that just fell to the bottom of the ocean,” Ceccarelli explained of SpongeBob’s home town. “Because of this, Bikini Bottom was supposed to be isolated, so we try to avoid surface-world pop-culture references because nobody down there would know, say, the popular musician of each successive generation.”
“We’ve been making the show for 25 years — and that’s several generations of kids,” Ceccarelli continued. “But past episodes are still just as funny, because they’re not weighted down by a bunch of secret knowledge that each generation has.”
Of course, that hasn’t stopped the show’s writers from sneaking in some sly allusions to their favorite books or movies here and there — like the time SpongeBob took the entire plot of Tremors and turned it into the all-time classic Alaskan Bull Worm episode. I still can’t believe Kevin Bacon didn’t try pushing the town somewhere else.
It’s nice to know that, thanks to the late, great Hillenburg’s thoughtful conception of the cartoon world that shaped so many childhoods, the rules of the SpongeBob universe shield it from ever suffering some celebrity-worship slop episode or an entire storyline about Squidward becoming a Twitch streamer.
Simpsons writers, take note — if you ever decide to stop writing Lady Gaga cameos and jokes about Homer’s Twitter feed, just decide that Springfield isn’t in Oregon or Maine, but at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
