Tom Kenny is canonizing a popular “SpongeBob SquarePants” fan theory.
Kenny, who has voiced the animated series’ star sponge since the show’s premiere in 1999 and received two Daytime Emmy Awards for his performance, recently confirmed that his character has autism.
“SpongeBob’s kind of on the spectrum, too, as a character,” he said during a May Q&A at Motor City Comic Con in Detroit. Footage of the Q&A reposted Tuesday on X has since gone viral.
During the panel, Kenny recalled the first time he was pressed on the subject: “A person who was obviously on the spectrum came up to me and said, ‘I have a question for you, Tom Kenny, is SpongeBob autistic?'”
He answered, “Of course!” and told the fan: “That’s his superpower, the same way that’s your superpower.”
Kenny previously spoke about SpongeBob’s neurodivergence in 2012 on the “WTF” podcast, calling his character “a little autistic. Obsessed with his job, very hardworking, gets really really deep into something.”
Fans have similarly pointed to SpongeBob’s meltdowns, blindness to sarcasm and inability to read social cues as textbook signs of the neurodevelopmental condition.
Most likely, show creator Stephen Hillenburg — who died in 2018 — didn’t intentionally write SpongeBob as a character who has autism, Kenny told Bleeding Cool in 2017.
“But once you put [a creative work] out in the world, it has different uses,” the voice actor said, “and the autism thing comes up so insanely often that I wish someone would write a term paper on it or a treatise on it.”
“SpongeBob SquarePants” is in its 14th season on Nickelodeon and has been renewed for Season 15.
The series’ fourth spinoff movie, “Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie” — which follows 2021’s “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run” — premieres Aug. 2 on Netflix.
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