THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF JOE BOB BRIGGS

We’ve got a 78 on the Vomit Meter, four breasts, 13 dead bodies, one dead brain, about three stars. Would have been a higher rating but the guys who made it are kinda looking down at the audience, and I don’t like that. -Joe Bob Briggs, reviewing The Brain, 1992.

The first question, of course, is just who is the tall, clean-featured movie-star ringer sitting, sensible briefcase by his side, in this chic Manhattan diner? Should you call him Joe Bob Briggs, drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, Texas {even though he’s been living in New York for almost two years)? Or is he John Bloom, Joe Bob’s creator? Does it even make sense to treat them as separate beings? Joe Bob would probably say this is just the kind of wimpola bullstuff that only a french-fry head journalist would fret about, but I can’t help it. Who is this guy? Joe Bob Bloom? John Briggs?

For those of you just finding your seats, a little background. From 1982 to 1985. most people reading the popular ’”Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In” each week in the Dallas Times Herald didn’t know that Joe Bob, the beer-swilling trailer-park bubba who reviewed slasher flicks and creature features (rating them for their quotient of “blood, breasts and beasts”), was in reality John Bloom, a soft-spoken, Vanderbilt-educated English major who also produced serious film criticism for the Herald, and wrote a searching, gutsy Metro column under his own name.

Then, in the spring of 1985, Joe Bob went where all good satirists eventually go-Too Far. After the infamous “We Are the Weird” column cost Joe Bob his job. Bloom would say he was lampooning the “We are the World” celebrities who left their limos long enough to warble against African famine, but angry minorities-led by County Commisioner John Wiley Price and KKDA DJ Willis Johnson-charged him with racism, They stormed the Dallas Times Herald offices and demanded Joe Bob’s gimme-capped head. The “High Sheriffs,” as Joe Bob always called his editors, their bosses, and all authority figures, caved in and killed the drive-in column. Nationally, the Times-Mirror Corporation dropped him from syndication. Bloom, who could have stayed on minus his alter ego, quit the paper in disgust.

So the show was over, at least for a while. As the lights went up and the windshields cleared, Joe Bob’s lovers and haters saw that Briggs was Bloom, and vice versa. For anyone who still doubted that two such disparate beings could dwell in one lanky 6-4 frame, Bloom soon worked up a live act and took to the stage, presenting Joe Bob in concert.

Over the years since the Herald fiasco, JB and JBB have continued to merge. Bloom landed a part as a DJ in the Jerry Lee Lewis bioflick. Great Balis of Fire, but Joe Bob’s name was there when the credits rolled. Bloom has all but stopped writing under his “real” name, and even when his prose reads more like Bloom than Briggs-as in a recent Playboy piece on Arnold Schwarzenegger-the byline belongs to Joe Bob.

Crossover dreams, anyone? Isn’t it…isn’t it like some 3 a.m. B-flick in which a mild dweeb of an insurance salesman gets zapped by radiation or drinks zombie juice and grows another head, and after much grunting and slobbering the bad head kills the good one and takes over?

Well, no. Bloom doesn’t see himself as a Dr. Frankenstein whose creation has broken out of the lab and gone lurching into the night to terrorize and gross out the villagers. JB and JBB get along quite nicely, thank you.

“I don’t disagree with anything Joe Bob says,” Bloom says, ignoring the menu’s nouvelle offerings in favor of a cheeseburger-American cheese, please-and coffee. “There are exaggerations, tricks, miscellaneous things he does or says that are outrageous. But his chief enemy is dishonesty and hypocrisy. And that’s John Bloom’s chief target as well.”

“This is one of the most original horror flicks I’ve seen in the last few years, starring Clare Wren as a killer robot woman with a computer for a brain but a body from Frederick’s of Hollywood. She walks around in a leather microskirt killing rapists-another feminist movie-and David Naughton plays a weenie cop. Two breasts. Nine dead bodies. Heads do roll. Check it out. “-review of Steel and Lace, 1990.

As his celebrated exit from the Herald demonstrated, Joe Bob Bloom is easy to misunderstand. But what else is new? Satire is the mine field of the literary landscape. Inscribed on the Tomb of the Unknown Satirist are these words: ’They didn’t get it.” They didn’t get it with Jonathan Swift (does he really want us to eat babies?). They didn’t get it with Mark Twain (does he have to say “nigger” so much?). And they didn’t get it with Joe Bob, who, in retrospect, looms as Dallas’ first victim of the political correctness movement.

But he’s thwarted his enemies and grown to become a national arbiter of pop-culture taste-or. some would say, taste-lessness. His weekly column, having outlasted the Herald and its High Sheriffs, is carried locally in the Dallas Observer and in 150 other mainstream and alternative papers around the country. He recently went to war in the Persian Gulf, appearing in Stars and Stripes. His Saturday night show, “Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater,” is one of The Movie Charniers most popular features and has been twice nominated for the Ace Award, the cable Emmy. He turns out a biweekly newsletter, “We Are the Weird.” that contains his reviews and social commentary and also serves as a bulletin board for news about the B-movie industry.

He’s played nightclubs and auditoriums around the country and released a video of his stage show. Joe Bob Briggs Dead in Concert. The horror, sci-fi and “le bad” sections of video stores carry the 21 titles ill Joe Bob’s series called The Sleaziest Movies in the History of the World, including classics of the genre like She Devils on Wheels, Blood Feast and 2,000 Maniacs. Last year, stretched too thin, he gave up a weekly radio show that was heard in some 75 markets. He’s made two appearances on “The Tonight Show” and put out four collections of humor writing, including A Guide to Western Civilization and The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs. As Joe Bob celebrates his 10th birthday this year, his trademark stamp of approval-“check it out”-tells legions of fans across the country that they’re in for a gold mine of gore.

Bloom was born in Dallas in 1953 and attended Winnetka Elementary in Oak Cliff before moving to Texarkana, Ark., and later to Little Rock when bis father, an 1RS agent, was promoted. His mother taught school in Little Rock. After graduation from Vanderbilt, (where he pledged Sigma Nu “for about three weeks”), he worked for newspapers in Philadelphia and Little Rock, drawing praise for stories exposing Ku Klux Klan activity in South Texas in the late ’70s and shedding light on the police killings of Mexican-Americans in South Texas. Bloom won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Social Reporting and was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award as a staff writer for Texas Monthly. With Dallas writer Jim Atkinson, he co-authored Evidence of Love, the story of suburban housewife and ax murderer Candy Montgomery. The 1984 book was made into a TV movie, “Killing in a Small Town.” In 1985 and 1986, Bloom wrote a monthly column, “Tales of the City,” for this magazine.

In the spring of 1991, the arc of Bloom’s career took him from Dallas to New York in a move that must have shocked many of his fans. Joe Bob, taking 1-30 Hast to Yan-keeland, the command and control center for the international communist/Donald Trump conspiracy to stamp out (he drive-in? Where would he park his metallic maroon ’72 Toronado with the curb feelers?

“I came up here to do more work in TV writing and performing,” says Bloom, who’s now 39. “Over time it had become more and more my career, and less and less newspapers and journalism. I wanted to do more in the entertainment field, and 1 didn’t want to live in Los Angeles.”

For some time before the move. Bloom had been working on a proposed series, still under consideration by Showtime. “Joe Bob’s America” deals with the misadventures of a bungling PBS-style documentary film crew searching in vain for the “real” America. Among the characters is a gonzo cameraman who longs to shoot action flicks and insists on forcing at least one zoom-in-from-the-copter shot into every program. “Since the whole thing is led by Joe Bob. it’s one continuing disaster,” Bloom says.

Along with the move came another decision: Joe Bob would continue on cable TV and in print, but he would take a break from live performing. It’s been almost two years since Joe Bob has faced an audience. “I was at the end of one cycle and starting a new thing,” Bloom says. “When I go out again, I’ll have a brand new show, totally different.”

One of Bloom’s goals is to star in a movie, but it’s a goal he pursues at his own pace, not Hollywood’s. He knows that the shelves of video stores are littered with the boxed corpses of one-hit comics.

“People have approached me for three years to do a Joe Bob movie. I say I’ll do one when we have a great script, and in order to have a great script, 1 have to have a great idea and execute it.” He’s had talks with producer Cary Woods, who’s making Mike (Wayne’s World) Myers’ new movie, I Married an Ax Murderer. Woods is interested, Bloom says, but there’s the matter of control. “That’s an issue with me.” he says. “Should it be low budget, where I can have a lot of control, or big budget, where I just: write and act?”

While he writes and steers Joe Bob toward the big screen, Bloom is taking acting lessons from Fred Kareman, one of the industry’s most respected coaches. Class meets twice a week, and Bloom works every day with a partner.

“It’s like playing golf or baseball,” Bloom says. “In order to stay in shape you’ve just got to work all the time. If you don’t, you get out of shape. Even on something as apparently informal as my TV show, if you don’t work constantly, you become closed off to the audience. You’re not as vulnerable as you should be.”

Any number of Bloom’s old journalism colleagues might be astonished to hear him praise openness and vulnerability. Many recall him as unusually quiet, aloof and, some say, a bit strange. Joe Bob sounds like he’d be glad to meet you down at the oasis for a cold one, amigo, but the real Bloom, for whatever professional and personal reasons, operates from behind a screen of agents, publicists, and gofers who shield him from prying fans and media leeches.

In a Los Angeles hotel two years ago, Bloom, rather than make the call himself, instructed a minion in his Dallas office to cancel an interview with a writer-this one, in fact-who was waiting two floors below. For this story, Bloom granted a cordial but brief interview and supplied written answers to a list of follow-up questions. A Dallas staffer then relayed the message that Bloom would answer no more questions and would not sit for a photo. No reason was given for the sudden change of heart; further questions were referred to his publicist.

An “enigma,” of course, is anyone a writer can’t figure out by deadline. But it’s still worth asking why a shy man wants to trade his word processor for stage and screen,

“I’m more comfortable in front of a thousand people or a TV camera than I am sitting here at lunch,” Bloom says. “It’s the nature of a lot of actors. You always think they’re bullshitting, but I think it’s the truth when Burt Reynolds says he’s basically a very shy person. You’re just so in control on a stage or doing a TV show.”

Bloom’s gone at acting in reverse, first launching a stage and TV career, building a following, and now pausing to work on his craft. Many of his friends winced-and his enemies chuckled-when Bloom look the risk of putting Joe Bob on the stage in 1985. Unfortunately, Joe Bob on stage didn’t live up to Joe Bob in print. He was catatonically stiff, he radiated discomfort, and he simply wasn’t convincing as a redneck raconteur. At least one longtime fan, after attending one of the early shows, said she found herself closing her eyes and pretending she was back home reading Joe Bob’s column.

Those who saw Joe Bob’s annual “Hubbie” awards on The Movie Channel this year know he’s grown more mobile and energetic on camera, though he’s still painting by numbers as an actor. Of course, Joe Bob’s dra matic skills should be judged with caution. Bloom’s playing a guy who would consider acting lessons a monumental waste of beer money; sand off too many rough edges, and some essential Joe Bobness might be lost-a danger Bloom seems to sense. At a recent taping session for “Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater” (still produced monthly at a Northeast Dallas studio), he allowed numerous blown lines and verbal glitches to stay on the tape. Joe Bob doesn’t want things to get too pretty.

“The education of a performer is more than the ability to make people laugh,” Bloom says. “If you just tell the joke mechanically, you’re not really open, and that doesn’t work. They’ll laugh all night and they’ll leave and they’ll wonder what they saw. What they really want is some living person who is there for them, and there is no separation between you and them.

“What makes live performance so much fun is it’s never the same way twice. There are no guarantees. It’s an exploration process.”



We got approximately 1,500 zombies. A 92 on the Vomit Meter. Four hundred thirty-five gallons of blood. Nine dead bodies. Thirty-seven undead dead bodies. Two dead breasts. Three and one-half heads roll. Ears roll. Fingers roll. Arms roll Stomachs roll. Necks roll. Cheeks roll…Check it out- review of Day of the Dead, 1985.



It’s the curse of any talented person to be measured against himself, but John Bloom will need lots of lessons before he can act Joe Bob the way he can write him. Take, for example, Joe Bob’s hilarious account, in Rolling Stone, of his part in the filming of that 1986 gorefest. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, part 2.

The starstruck Joe Bob, who idolizes Saw director Tobe Hooper, was granted a brief walk-on-and-die part as “chainsaw meat” for Leather-face and his murderous kin. As proof that the drive-in gods have a sense of humor, former Dallas socialite Twinkle Bayoud (now Buckner), fresh from an appearance on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” was also “shish kebabbed” by the Saw Family.

“Thank God we finally got to her payoff line, which is ’You two wanna go to Austin? It’s just 20 minutes away by jet. That s the signal for Leatherface to spring out of the back of the caterin’ truck with a chain saw in his hand and Robin Leach this woman to death. I asked if we could cut her face in half, but they said there wasn’t enough time to rig her head for the complete Old Faithful treatment. She had to die off camera.”

Months later, Joe Bob and Twinkle literally wound up on the cutting room floor, their moments of gory glory slashed from the final version of Saw 2. That outrage led to another column in which Joe Bob argued for the true artistic value of the excised scene. Both pieces are collected in Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-in; readers can judge for themselves whether they’d rather see Joe Bob hacked up on screen or laugh at his rendering of the whole bizarre story in print.

What we’ve got here is your basic AIDS-made-into-a-monster plot, with genetic-DNA mutants rampaging through the countryside, infecting the population, and hanging around caves where they can find fresh virgins to impregnate with their nasty mutant seed. Have sex tonight, get pregnant in the morning, give birth tomorrow night-and by the third night, you’d better have a good boarding school in mind or else the thing chews your head off. It ’s like the whole joyous experience of having children, compressed into 72 hours.- review of The Terror Within II, 1992.



Though he and wife Paula Bloom have traded that mythical Grapevine trailer park for a Tribeca loft. Bloom doesn’t plan to forget the city where he and Joe Bob were born. Besides taping his cable show here each month, he maintains an office and staff in a Northwest Highway apartment building. He even remembers where he was the day the Dallas Times Herald died last December.

“A lot of friends called to gloat, thinking 1 would really enjoy it,” Bloom says. “I didn’t. The paper had been brain dead a long time, not contributing much to the city. But as long as it’s alive, you figure there’s always a chance to get another owner, a new management team, and become a living organism again.”

These days, Bloom seldom discusses his departure from the Herald. It’s time to move on, he tells people; he feels “vindicated” by events, and he knows that many of his fans never forgave the Herald for killing off Joe Bob. But he admits he’s still puzzled by the decision of the High Sheriffs.

“People will accept almost anything a paper does except show that it can be bought or manipulated or forced to back down,” Bloom says. “I’ll probably go to my grave not knowing what could so possess a newspaper editor that he would back down to a politician. And especially a sleazy politician.

“My quarrel was never with John Wiley Price. In the political world he functions in, results are the only thing, so he’ll say what he has to say. He represents his constituency, and that’s what he found that worked. What’s bad is that a newspaper editor could be sucked in by it.”

Having spent some time in the New York melting pot. Bloom says the Dallas media is “naive” by contrast, more easily manipulated by racial demagogues. “There’s really more tolerance, in a weird sort of way, up here. Mayor Dinkins always reminds people that there are 180 ethnic groups in New York City, no one of them more important than the other. I think that’s the American way, right?”

A good question, one Bloom continues to ponder from the perspective of a self-described “First Amendment radical.” When William M. Gaines died this summer, Joe Bob wrote a moving eulogy for the founder and publisher of Mad Magazine: “He had done what any great satirist does-laughed at 100 percent of the human race. All the people who read hidden agendas into his work were disappointed. He was interested in humor. Nothing else,”

In that column. Joe Bob noted that the real censorship battles are not between “evil government officials” and well-funded organs of the mainstream media. The real battleground, he wrote, is on the fringe.

“Everybody believes that The New York Times should never be censored…It’s the goofy guys, the offbeat characters like William M. Gaines, who fight the real battles. Because most people will say, ’It’s only Mad Magazine. What does it matter?’ “

It matters to Bloom, whether it’s the Times, CBS or somebody’s wacky new idea for reviewing splatter flicks as if they were high art. That’s why he readily defends the rapper Ice-T, recently the tar-gel of a police-organized boycott because of his controversial rap, “Cop Killer.”

“The fact that there’s a lyric calling for the killing of cops doesn’t bother me a bit,” Bloom says. “It’s just a lyric. It’s just a song. Ice-T is actually a very talented guy, and he’s got the right to do his work. He’s also a very principled guy, but even if he weren’t, it’s a no-brainer. Leave him alone, It’s a song.”

As the voices of John Bloom and Joe Bob Briggs gradually blend in harmony, Bloom finds himself frequently pressing Joe Bob past the natural limits of the character, imparting more and more of an educated man’s knowledge to the redneck persona.

“I use the character of Joe Bob as an alter ego. a grab-bag character 1 can change according to the environment he’s in,” Bloom says. ’’Not to be too pretentious about it. but a parallel would be with Charlie Chaplin, He only did one character, really, his whole life. But depending on the movie he was in, that character had a different job. a different attitude.”

Joe Bob purists (if such creatures exist) may fear that their Number One Bubba is going uptown, but Joe Bob’s gradual mutation into Joe John Bloombriggs has allowed the character to grow beyond the vanishing world of the drive-in. and freed him to meddle in matters that have little to do with Wanda Bodine’s beauty shop or Ugly-on-a-Stick’s dating habits.

Case in point: In a recent column called “Let Bill Have His Nookie.” Joe Bob defended Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton-though not in words that will appear in Clinton ads-by posing several questions, among them:

“Are there any marriages in America that have not been through some kind of affair. lust, betrayal or. in Texas. “You’re-a-fat-pig-anddon’t-wanna-sleep-withh-you-anyrnore’ episode? In other words, isn’t he [Clinton] kind of a model of a good husband-the kind that loves women, maybe loves a lot of women, but who sticks it out with one woman instead of hauling hiney into the next county, checking into a cinder-block singles apartment, and paying child support the rest of his life?”

In the wake of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. Joe Bob sallied forth to skewer the media for hypocrisy. He blasted the numerous columns and commentaries by female journalists complaining of oppression at the hands of sex-crazed male chauvinists.

“Everybody I’ve met in the press is fairly hip about sex,” Bloom says. ’Then they act naive when they write these articles saying you just don’t realize how difficult it is for a woman to assert her rights in the workplace. I wanted to say. excuse me. are you the one in a thousand female reporters who wouldn’t say ’F- you’ on a second’s notice? I’ve worked in newsrooms all my life, and I’ve never seen a shrinking violet female reporter. Most of these women can

handle themselves.”

They can burn us up. They can knock us down. But they can’s close the drive-in in our hearts.-Joe Bob Briggs, 1982



Bloom’s newest book, Iron Joe Bob, is just what its title implies: a sendup of the men’s movement and the whole Robert Bly-Sam Keen school of hairy-chested mythophallic romanticism. Men have become weenies, Briggs writes, and weeni-fication has cut them off from their ancient sources of power: “Men have lost touch with their Spears, their Maces, their Battering Rams, and what have they replaced them with? Weed Eaters.” He locates the problem in the “weenie lobe” of the brain, buried deep in the cerebellum, and proposes radical surgery.

But while he’s keeping a foot in the world of print. Joe Bob Briggs will continue his crossover into the world of TV and the movies, where he finds, he says, a more congenial atmosphere.

“I’ve always had such a struggle simply getting editors to carry my column,” Bloom says. “They say it’s oh. so controversial. In many cases I was doing the same material on TV and being nominated for Ace Awards. TV is the medium for me because it’s more open and accepting.”

During his annual Drive-in Academy Awards last May, Joe Bob Briggs surveyed 1991’s cinematic garbahzh-including Naked Obsession, Bride of Re-Animator, A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell and Vampire Trailer Park. He noted that the “Hardtop Academy” in “El Lay” had just anointed Silence of the Lambs as Best Picture and Jonathan Demme as Best Director, Briggs hailed the ascension of Demme. maker of drive-in fare like as a triumph for the cause of celluloid trash. He applauded the “new emerging detente between the Drive-in Academy Awards and the Hardtop Academy Awards,” and urged the mainstreamers “to seek out many more films based on the life of the famous mass murdering maniac, Ed Gein.”

The thought of such a “detente” would make Dan Quayle quail, but Bloom has always believed that Joe Bob stood hip-deep in the bloody mainstream, speaking to and for the masses. Looking at the spot where bottom line meets lowest common denominator, it’s hard to argue with the numbers. Briggs’ hero, Big Arnold Schwarzenegger, has gone from low-budget Barbarian to Hollywood’s most bankable star. And it’s a safe bet that even those family-valuing culture warriors at the Houston GOP convention have lined up to see high-dollar B-flicks like Terminator 2, Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct.

Bloom sees his odyssey, from newspapers to alternative papers to newsletters and cable TV, as a passage from the land of the dead to the land of the living. Even papers tike the Observer, he says, have become mainstream, while the true avant-garde alternatives are now comic papers and “fanzines” like Gore Gazette, Blue Suede News and Murder Can Be Fun. With the advent of desktop publishing, he says, “every idiot in American can be a publisher. Now we can publish without the help of the barons.”

As the culture rushes toward whatever it’s rushing toward, John Bloom is happy to be part of that future feared by so many print dinosaurs. While the straight press worries about its aging demographics and wonders how young people can be induced to read, Joe Bob’s mailbag is full of letters from teen-agers and people in their 20s, he says. Their parents don’t know why they watch slice-and-dice “Spam-in-a-cabin” films, but Joe Bob understands.

“These movies take the adult world and put chaos in it,” he says. “Parents will always despise this stuff. The parents felt that way about Frankenstein and Dracula.”

In a society officially pledged to diversity, tolerance and sensitivity, a satirist like Joe Bob Briggs puts our convictions to the test: How much diversity do we really want? How many voices get to sing in the American choir?

This past summer. Briggs summed up his credo in a column explaining why he took the archetypal redneck’s name of Joe Bob. It was an effort, he wrote, to put himself on the “bottom rung” of society, to show solidarity with the low-bom, the uneducated, the unprivileged. He reminded readers that he picks on everybody, without regard to race, creed, gender or sexual preference.

Such a working philosophy guarantees repeated skirmishes with an ever-lengthening list of aggrieved interest groups. Implicitly, the column harked back to the “We Are the Weird” debacle, when even some of Bloom’s liberal friends within culturally elite circles broke with him over his insistence that nobody-and no cause-is beyond the reach of laughter.

“The people who scream say. ’You can joke about them, But you can’t joke about these helpless people.’

“And what they don’t realize is that we’re all helpless,” Joe Bob says. “We’re all a lot less powerful and in control and together than we think. That’s what makes us funny.”

Satire fu. Freedom fu. Four stars. Check it out.