‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Made the Single Most High-Brow Joke in Nickelodeon History
SpongeBob SquarePants is the only kids’ comedy show in TV history that could get away with making amazing jokes about Art Nouveau and French Post-Impressionism, and nothing you can d’Orsay or do will change my mind.
Of all the influential cartoons from the Golden Age of Nickelodeon, no series put in a more impressive effort to educate its target audience on art and culture that was way above their reading level than SpongeBob SquarePants. In fact, when the Gothic horror blockbuster Nosferatu premiered late last year, director Robert Eggers thanked SpongeBob for introducing so many members of his audience to the classic horror character and the original 1922 silent German Expressionist vampire film.
Despite being a silly animated show about an anthropomorphic sponge who makes cheeseburgers, the SpongeBob SquarePants writers’ room was full of educated art-lovers whose devotion to classic culture so often sailed 20,000 leagues over their viewers’ heads.
Don't Miss
As the show tends to do, SpongeBob SquarePants began to trend on Twitter again this week as fans shared viral clips from the show that had them crying from laughter, with one particularly artistic SpongeBob stan pointing out that the series once made a joke so cultured and esoteric that most fans wouldn’t get it until they reached grad school:
“Whoever wrote this joke must’ve remembered the name Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec from an art history class they took in college and waited years for the perfect moment to use the knowledge they got from that lecture,” the original poster of the above tweet posited.
Not only did SpongeBob SquarePants make what is likely the only reference to 19th century French painter and illustrator Toulouse-Lautrec in the history of Nickelodeon animation, but the cultivated cartoonists did it in the show’s very first season — the above clip comes from the 1999 episode “Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost,” wherein Squidward unintentionally tricks SpongeBob and Patrick into thinking that he’s a spirit that’s come back from the dead and compels them to do his ghostly bidding.
When compared to the many throwaway lines that betray the impressively mature sensibilities of the SpongeBob SquarePants writers’ room, this high-brow bit required a much more involved effort to make the joke land for the dozen-or-so parents who got it during its first airing. For this two-second rim-shot, the art department had to remake Toulouse-Lautrec’s iconic 1896 lithograph La Troupe de Mademoiselle Églantine as the cleverly revised “Troupe de Poisson,” with fish heads of various species replacing the original cabaret dancers.
While the French aristocracy of Toulouse-Lautrec’s time may have viewed his work as base and unbefitting of his own refined background, largely due to Toulouse-Lautrec’s affinity for brothels and the women within them, today, the art world considers him to be one of France’s most influential and visionary artists, and his work hangs in many of the most esteemed art museums in the world. Just the same, while the TV world originally considered SpongeBob SquarePants to be a simple kids’ show for bored baby sitters to throw on during the 1990s, today, it’s a cultural masterpiece worthy of similar examination and admiration to Toulouse-Lautrec’s work.
To any museum curator who has been waiting patiently to put together an exhibit on SpongeBob SquarePants, I say — van Gogh for it.
