SpongeBob star reflects on character's 'comfort food' legacy ahead of Search for SquarePants: 'Th...

&34;Comedy's always done well during tough times,&34; longtime voice actor Tom Kenny tells EW. SpongeBob star reflects on character's 'comfort food' legacy ahead of Search for SquarePants: 'The world is tough' &34;Comedy's always done well during tough times,&34; longtime voice actor Tom Kenny tells EW. By Nick Romano :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/NicholasRomanoauthorphotoadc9b60763e34711935cbf7b3d768d24.jpg) Nick Romano is a senior editor at with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.

"Comedy's always done well during tough times," longtime voice actor Tom Kenny tells EW.

SpongeBob star reflects on character's 'comfort food' legacy ahead of Search for SquarePants: 'The world is tough'

"Comedy's always done well during tough times," longtime voice actor Tom Kenny tells EW.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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November 24, 2025 10:00 a.m. ET

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'The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants'. Credit:

Paramount Pictures

- Tom Kenny, the longtime voice behind SpongeBob, talks about how the character continues to be a reprieve from tough times.

- The Tired SpongeBob meme is "how everybody feels all the time," he says while discussing how people use the character to express themselves.

- He discusses the upcoming *SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants* and how it's reminiscent of the 2004 film.

Even SpongeBob himself can feel we're living through difficult times.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early November, the Zoom background of Tom Kenny, the voice of the cackling cartoon sea sponge with square pants, is a snapshot from the long-running kids series. As the actor discusses his new movie, *The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants* (in theaters Dec. 19), an image of the Nickelodeon character leaning a hand against a wall inside his home is always visible.

It's reminiscent of the Tired SpongeBob meme, which depicts a pants-less SpongeBob deeply exhaling with exhaustion and, in Kenny's eyes, feels representative of our current collective moment.

"That's how everybody feels all the time," he tells **, having come off a marathon recording session a day earlier, where the iconic actor of animation says he was "nonstop screaming" for hours in the voiceover booth.

Most recently, in his personal life, Kenny says he received countless text messages from people he's worked with at Paramount over the decades of making the SpongeBob show and movies. Amid the Skydance acquisition of the studio, thousands of jobs were cut, with more layoffs expected in the weeks ahead. And this isn't isolated to just Paramount. It seems both the media and entertainment industries are losing more jobs by the quarter.

Barb, Flying Dutchman, Patrick Star, and SpongeBob SquarePants in 'The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants'.

Paramount Pictures

"It's just crazy, weird, unbalanced times. Nobody knows what's happening. Everybody's got their head down, everybody's scared," Kenny says. "Your coworkers are getting picked off. You know, 'Nice working with you. I'm no longer with the company. Just wanted to tell you [that] you and Jill have always been so nice to me.'" (Kenny's wife is comedian and voice actress Jill Talley.) "I get like six of those texts a week. It's nice to get those texts, but it's also super sad. It's gonna be a rough Christmas for people."

It's not the kind of conversation one anticipates coming in to interview the longtime voice of SpongeBob about this December's new SpongeBob movie, but Kenny, who loves to talk about animation (and just loves to talk in general), falls into this subject on his own.

SpongeBob, he posits, has become a way for people to communicate, which is why he points to the Tired SpongeBob meme. Kenny isn't on social media — "I have kind of a hermit mentality when it comes to that stuff," he jokes — but the veteran of the biz knows how a certain demographic seems to speak in SpongeBob quotes and memes.

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"It really is like comfort food," he says. "Those people that grew up on the show, they need comfort right now. They tell me they do. Adulting is hard and overrated, but you gotta do it. You know, 'Join or die!' The world is tough, and you're just inundated with sad, negative, cruel things all the time, every day, hourly. So, I guess, whether it's 11 minutes or 86 minutes, if you can dip into SpongeBob for a little bit — and it's silly and he's this weirdo that lets his freak flag fly, but people still like him — there's something very empowering about that for people. Comedy's always done well during tough times, like economic depressions and just tough times in general. SpongeBob really doesn't exist for any other reason than to be funny."

*The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants*, directed by Derek Drymon, shows the titular sponge joining ghost pirate the Flying Dutchman (Mark Hamill) on an adventure to the Underworld with Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) to prove his bravery to Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown). It's a movie that features an interesting ensemble of actors, too. In addition to Hamill and franchise veterans like Rodger Bumpass and Carolyn Lawrence, there are voice parts for rapper Ice Spice, Regina Hall, Arturo Castro, Sherry Cola, and George Lopez.

Patrick Star and SpongeBob SquarePants in 'The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants'.

Paramount Pictures

Drymon, whom Kenny calls "OG SpongeBob," had a story in mind for some time that used SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs to explore father-son relationships, with the Flying Dutchman serving as a stepfather figure. Kenny has seen it twice now, once on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles with the legend behind Luke Skywalker himself. "I felt like a mogul, like smoking a cigar," he recalls. "'Roll it!' Like *The Last Tycoon*."

While considering why SpongeBob has lasted through the decades, Kenny doesn't have a definitive answer, which, in a roundabout way, is also the reason for the character's longevity. "SpongeBob has always been from the very, very beginning a total anomaly," he says.

Even against the current animation boom we've seen in 2025 from audiences around the world (e.g., *KPop Demon Hunters*, *Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle*), it's difficult for Kenny to place SpongeBob in that context.

"Where the market is at, animation-wise, is amazing, but also since everything out there is utterly unlike SpongeBob, I don't know how useful it is as a comparison," he comments. "I kinda like the unknowability, WTF-ness of it all, you know? SpongeBob's always been like that. It's always defied the odds. It's always been this anomalous, weird thing, maybe along with *The Simpsons*, as well. I always feel kinship with that show and those actors."

Kenny likens *The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants* to the vibe of the first *SpongeBob* movie, released in 2004, which is revered by the SpongeBob crowds. It prompts Kenny to examine how the audience has evolved with the character over the years. "I do a lot of Comic-Con appearances, and I just get that constantly, that Millennials were young when SpongeBob came out, and [for] a lot of them, that first SpongeBob movie was the first movie they ever saw in a theater. That's very heavy. Everybody remembers that first time you were in a movie theater."

Barb and Flying Dutchman in 'The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants'.

Paramount Pictures

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Kenny thinks of it in the same way as *Star Wars* and the oscillating reactions to the releases that came out after the original trilogy, including the prequels. "It's hard to recapture what people felt when they saw *Star Wars* in 1977," he continues. "You're never gonna feel [like] that, even if *The Phantom Menace* was the best thing ever."

Still, as people chase that nostalgia, he hopes SpongeBob can remain a reprieve. It's a reprieve for Kenny, as well, he admits.

"It's funny, I've been saying in interviews since the beginning of SpongeBob, I realize that I've been giving variations on the answer, it's a cruel world out there. It's a mean world, and it seems like meanness is in the ascendancy," he says. "Boy, little did I know in 1999 what we were in for in the cruelty/meanness department. That was just a preliminary bout of the devastating boxing match that we've been in for decades."

He looks back on those first years of SpongeBob on air, which began during the Bill Clinton administration, followed shortly by the George W. Bush administration. "It's not like SpongeBob came out during utopian times during the George W. years or whatever," Kenny continues. "It's like, you know, 'Hey, Dick Cheney!' There we go, but now more than ever, I guess, people need that. Things are so in flux on every conceivable level of life. The one little log that you can grab onto in that raging river while praying that you don't go over the waterfall is stuff like SpongeBob. That makes me really happy to be that for people."**

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Source: "EW Movies"

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Source: Movies

Published: November 24, 2025 at 10:38PM on Source: MARIO MAG

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