Somebody Had to Do It

The SpongeBob porn parody exists. It’s called SpongeKnob SquareNuts, and that title alone tells you everything you need to know about the ambition and the execution. This is the inevitable endpoint of any beloved children’s property: someone, eventually, will make it explicit. The only surprise is that it took this long. SpongeBob has always had a certain energy—the frenetic enthusiasm, the submissive eagerness to please, the fact that he lives alone in a pineapple and his best friend is a dim, soft-bodied creature named Patrick—and if you want to argue that the adult film industry was simply following the source material to its logical conclusion, I’m not sure I have a strong counterargument. The ocean was always filthy. We just didn’t say it out loud.