Photograph: Allstar/NICKELODEON/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Spongebob rejoices at the start of another day. He is flawed, vulnerable but endearing, while being quietly, mutably omnipotent.įlawed, vulnerable but endearing.

The memes work because we both see ourselves in SpongeBob and aspire to be him. Hop on Twitter or Instagram and you are never far from an “evil Patrick”, used to illustrate amusing misdeeds, or SpongeBob himself, looking relieved, angry, stoned or indeed any other human mood. It’s this purity of intent that makes SpongeBob so globally popular, and such an absorbent medium for online memes. The world will bend to you without you trying. So often children are told merely to “be yourself”, but what if that self is corrupted? SpongeBob evolves the message: fill your heart with kindness and then be yourself. It usually goes badly for SpongeBob to begin with, those eyes suddenly massive and brimming – but in the end he triumphs, often thanks to errors the others make due to their self-interest or negativity. Off they go for 11 minutes at time, the oppositional energies colliding. SpongeBob is the idealist, met with both cynicism (Squidward, Plankton and Mr Krabs, a triptych of venality) and chaos (best friend Patrick, a starfish of pure id). Hillenburg stripped our world back to literal cartoon versions of human behaviour. But brilliant as these creations often are, none had the radical naivety of SpongeBob – it was his eternal, reflexive positivity, gifted to him by Hillenburg, that made him truly exceptional.Īs Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob, told me, the show has “comedic archetypes that have worked for hundreds of years, further back than Shakespeare”. There are echoes of the Ernst-like plasticity of Ren & Stimpy and the pop art brashness of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, with just the occasional parent-facing deadpan gag, the kind that peppered Rugrats, Dexter’s Laboratory and later, the Shrek movies. Photograph: Anacleto Rapping/Getty Images This was just one of the surrealistic, deadpan cartoons that populated 1990s American TV, a countercultural strain that SpongeBob was synthesised from and Hillenburg perfected.Ĭhild-like. He was essentially a failed marine biologist who went into cartooning because he was better at it, working first on the Nickelodeon show Rocko’s Modern Life. Hillenburg, who I was fortunate enough to interview in 2016, was nuts about life under the sea ever since a childhood reared on scuba diving and Jacques Cousteau. Across 242 episodes, two movies (plus a third incoming), a Broadway musical, thousands of memes and your kid’s lunchbox, his creation has become a cultural titan. Wherever the inspiration came from, it was made sponge by Stephen Hillenburg, the character’s creator who has died tragically young at 57 years old of motor neurone disease. The very fact SpongeBob exists at all feels almost like proof of the existence of God: the inspiration needed for something of such pure originality has to be divine. The rediscovery is a jolt of sheer delight.

Spongebob thousands of years later