Mrs. Puff is the teacher of the Boating School that SpongeBob attends in SpongeBob SquarePants. She is voiced by Mary Jo Catlett.
Personality[]
Mrs. Puff is very paranoid and has a history of mental instability. In "No Free Rides", it is implied that she had to move to another town and start a new life with a new name from the past. Mrs. Puff seems to have a rather very dark history according to various episodes and may also suggest a far more sinister mental instability.
In fact, various episodes show that she has lived in a different town, taught in a different boating school, and that Mrs. Puff is not her actual name. This is possibly due to a previous failure with a student that may have had anxiety or a severe lack of common sense that SpongeBob often suffers. This is slightly confirmed in "Lighthouse Louie" where a file labelled "Mrs. Puff" can be seen behind the handle of a cooking pot and close to the picture of Mr. Krabs with hearts on it. This is all seen as SpongeBob cleans out the boating school's lighthouse.
This is again confirmed in "Lighthouse Louie" when an old "New Kelp Post" newspaper titled "Deranged Boat Teacher Makes Getaway," and dated October 21, is seen if paused at the right moment. This once again confirms Mrs. Puff's mental instability and dark history. The subtitles on the paper also read "Distracts Authorities With Balloon Animals" which is exactly what Mrs. Puff was hoping to remember when she attempted to steal SpongeBob's boating vehicle in "No Free Rides". The picture in the newspaper also appears in the imaginary news broadcast episode as she imagines the terrors of SpongeBob driving out on the open road without any actual training. Another thing that references this is the fact that the fish reporter in the imaginary broadcast had hair which may hint that how she imagined it is exactly what had caused her to flee to Bikini Bottom in the first place.
While this is mostly caused by SpongeBob's antics, she also suffers her pain of losing her husband, who is now a reading lamp. She is also shown to have a strict Zero-Tolerance Policy in "New Student Starfish," as she accuses SpongeBob of all Patrick's disruptions and even ignores SpongeBob when he tries to explain anything and doesn't tolerate fighting. However, teaching and driving give her great joy, so her general outlook on life is a positive one and she always remains optimistic. When she does not have to drive with SpongeBob, she loves her job. In fact, just the thought of SpongeBob seems to drive her mad with anxiety and sinister rage. This is confirmed in almost every episode the two interact in.
However, because of her past, her mental state has degraded and deteriorated, but somewhat healed. When she found SpongeBob to be unteachable, it caused her mental state to collapse once again. This happens in almost every episode technically, but in some episodes, SpongeBob's lack of common sense and failure to adhere to driving laws has drove her over the edge, even to the point she once attempted to get him killed and even attempted to kill him herself though both attempts failed due to obvious plot armor, SpongeBob's luck, and Mrs. Puff's horrible luck. "Doing Time" has Mrs. Puff's mental state nearly collapse as SpongeBob and Patrick attempt to break her free which was revealed to be a dream. This did not end either.
It was one dream after another which led Mrs. Puff to eventually give up whether she was back in reality or still dreaming. In one episode, Mrs. Puff is seen in the background talking to an ice sculpture of SpongeBob during his house party. Also in "No Free Rides", there is a picture in Mrs. Puff's house that shows Mrs. Puff at the exact moment she's standing in the door way which goes in presumably an infinite loop of a picture within a picture. This is just one of several hints of her delusional mental state. A similar picture also appears in "Bumper to Bumper".
Overall, Mrs. Puff is a very patient fish. She thinks nothing is more satisfying than passing another boating student. While she does not always show it, her dislike toward driving with SpongeBob is not only caused by his dangerous antics but by a feeling of self-doubt and disappointment in herself as well. She desperately wants to pass him and she won't feel that she has succeeded as a teacher if SpongeBob never graduates. Thus, getting SpongeBob a driver's license is a goal shared by both of them and Mrs. Puff remains dedicated to continuing teaching SpongeBob until that moment.
Since SpongeBob seems unteachable, Mrs. Puff often has to think outside the box to get closer to the goal of getting SpongeBob to drive. She often thinks up plans to find new ways of teaching him, hoping each time that she has found the key. While her plans never succeed, they have come exceedingly close. For example, in "Bumper to Bumper", she tries to rid SpongeBob of anxiety while driving by giving him the road test in a desert in the middle of nowhere. SpongeBob can clear his conscience and drives very well, but the driving test ends up being nullified because Mrs. Puff violated her parole when she drove so far away.
At the beginning of the series, Mrs. Puff seems to be a little optimistic towards SpongeBob and treats him like a good student, save for a few moments when SpongeBob crashes during the course. However, as the series progressed, Mrs. Puff seemed to have developed an intense hatred for him and can even get a bit of mental instability by just looking at him. In "Krusty Love", her thoughts and fears about SpongeBob cause her to think that she was giving SpongeBob a driving test even though they are not at school or driving.
In the episode "Demolition Doofus", it is shown that Mrs. Puff has finally been driven completely insane by SpongeBob's antics. After losing her ability to puff up, thanks to another failed test by SpongeBob, she becomes incredibly hostile towards him. After seeing the many hospitalized competitors of the annual demolition derby, she decides to sign SpongeBob up for it, hoping that he will get killed in the derby. However, SpongeBob proves to be very hard to take down and he even eliminates all the other competitors. At this point, Mrs. Puff enters the derby in a huge truck and tries to murder SpongeBob herself, only to crash into her boating school and regain her ability to puff up. It is also her first known time tranquilized.
Mrs. Puff is courteous and respectful to her students unless they cause trouble like SpongeBob. Despite being an authority figure, she threatens to kick SpongeBob's butt at the end of "The Bully", believing that SpongeBob punched Flats the Flounder when in reality he passed out from exhaustion after punching SpongeBob. When someone misbehaves in class, she can get very strict. She takes her zero-tolerance policy to its most extreme in "New Student Starfish" when she is completely oblivious to all of Patrick's disruptions but blames SpongeBob for everything, even telling SpongeBob he can't when he tries to explain what is going on. Of course, Mrs. Puff only acts this way because she cares about SpongeBob and Patrick's learning experience and doesn't want them to miss anything she teaches. The thought of SpongeBob intentionally misbehaving shocks her, since he usually tries his best in class.
Mrs. Puff is known to love food, especially chocolate cake and pasta. Sometimes, she uses idioms involving junk foods such as cake, like in "The Getaway" when she tells Dorsal Dan "you're no chocolate cake" as a way of saying "you're no good." She is even shown to like steamed coral in "Krusty Love", although it is shown in other episodes to be a very unappetizing and tasteless food.
There are a few things that Mrs. Puff notably hates. Her list of common annoyances in "Doing Time" includes phone solicitors, company potlucks, insurance payments, and especially road rage. She has an irrational fear of low-quality daytime television, to the point where watching it makes her burst into tears in "The Krabby Kronicle".
Her classroom pet peeves are rowdy behavior in the hallways and students talking to each other during a lesson. She also does not like it when a student interrupts her teaching and tries to teach the class themselves. This is highlighted in "Nautical Novice" when SpongeBob tries to impress Mrs. Puff by providing the class with an abundance of boating-related knowledge on their field trip in an attempt to earn his driver's license. Instead of making her proud, SpongeBob makes Mrs. Puff angry because he does all of the teachings instead of her.
Ironically, she does not hate spending time in jail and likes it in prison because it offers her a break from the stresses of school life, particularly SpongeBob's reckless driving. In "Doing Time," she explains to SpongeBob and Patrick: "I like it here. These are my people!" Earlier in the episode, she is shown happily doing menial prison tasks like breaking rocks and making license plates while singing a cheery song.
Because her profession involves driving and a lot of boat crashes, she has an insurance agent and a personal therapist. Her agent has never made an appearance on screen, but she is known to call him or her whenever she knows SpongeBob will be around. Sometimes, such as in "Teacher's Pests", Mrs. Puff has to interrupt class to call her therapist and ask for a "mega dose" of anxiety medication.
Mrs. Puff is often accused of SpongeBob's reckless driving and havoc wreak, with the authorities believing that she fails to educate him, and usually gets arrested in each instance. She was blamed for SpongeBob's destruction of Bikini Bottom in "Hall Monitor," leading to her arrest. In "Patrick-Man!," Patrick frames Mrs. Puff for stealing a boat when she was trying to free a student trapped in it. The authorities believe him and thereby arrest Mrs. Puff. In "The Sponge Who Could Fly", Mrs. Puff is among the many citizens rioting against SpongeBob for refusing to do any more favors.
During the comic Puff's Pageant, it's revealed that Mrs. Puff has robbed multiple banks and that she may go back to robbing banks if she loses her boating school.
Trivia[]
- In "Patty Hype", Incidental 112 appears in the coloration of Mrs. Puff.
- Mrs. Puff inflating as a result of SpongeBob crashing his boatmobile is a reference to the airbags in passenger sides of vehicles that go off whenever said passenger is endangered.
- It is known that Mrs. Puff is ambidextrous because she uses her right hand in the episode "Boating School", but in "Sandy's Rocket", she writes with her left hand.In "Hello Bikini Bottom!", Mrs. Puff owns her very own bus, which Mr. Krabs ends up stealing.
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