O’Brien asked Kenny about the “controversy” surrounding Squidward, the curmudgeonly octopus who considers SpongeBob a friend and the bane of his existence. Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob, was once asked about the show’s blatant queer coding on The Late Night Show With Conan O’Brien, an exchange that Beatty also included in her WSJ piece. The whole thing is pretty brilliant, and it makes perfect sense that critics would accuse SpongeBob Squarepants of carrying a hidden gay agenda. Instead, it does not assume that there is anything inherently funny about two men raising a child. A lazier show could have easily made the gist of the comedy the mere fact that SpongeBob and Patrick are two guys in a relationship, à la I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. It astutely paints these roles as a kind of drag. It’s funny that these two male buddies see no other way to raise this oyster baby than to assume the stereotypical mommy and daddy roles, to become a caricature of the ‘50s idea of a nuclear family. It takes as its comedic subject the myopia of heterosexual gender norms. Most important, however, is where the episode places the crux of the humor, and what it chooses to exaggerate for laughs. The two fight, it’s all absolutely ridiculous, and at the end Patrick says to SpongeBob, “Let’s have another.”
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It satirizes the heteronormative tropes of parenthood: SpongeBob, the mom, stays at home to take care of domestic issues while Patrick, the dad, goes off to “work,” leaving SpongeBob to the stressful affair of housekeeping and childrearing. In the episode, SpongeBob dons a dress, sun hat, and parasol. Take the iconic episode Rock-a-Bye Bivalve, in which SpongeBob and his best pal Patrick Star assume the role of parents to care for a baby scallop, whom they name Junior. Hillenburg’s statement, paired with his body of work on SpongeBob, makes it pretty clear that his intent was to play with and even sabotage the norms of masculinity that were so prevalent in media at that time.
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But Hillenburg issued these statements in 2002, in the thick of the ultra patriotic Bush-era conservatism that percolated amidst pop culture then.