John Irving Bloom (born January 27, 1953), who uses the pseudonym Joe Bob Briggs, is a syndicated American film critic, writer and comic performer.
Early years
Bloom was born in Dallas, Texas, the son of Thelma Louise (née Berry) and Rudolph Lewis Bloom.[1] He was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and attended Vanderbilt University on a sports-writing scholarship. He began his writing career at Texas Monthly and Dallas Times Herald. While a movie reviewer at the Times Herald, he created the humorous persona of "Joe Bob Briggs" to review "exploitation" movies.
Persona
Briggs's persona is that of an unapologetic and unrefined redneck and male chauvinist with an avowed love of the drive-in theatre. He specializes in humorous but appreciative reviews of b-movies and cult films, which he calls drive-in movies (as distinguished from "indoor bullstuff"). In addition to his usual parody of urbane, high-brow movie criticism, his columns characteristically include colorful tales of women-troubles and high-spirited brushes with the law, tales which inevitably conclude with his rush to catch a movie at a local drive-in, usually with female companionship. The reviews typically end with a brief rating of the "high points" of the movie in question, including the types of action (represented by nouns naming objects used in fight scenes suffixed with -fu), the number of bodies, number of female breasts bared, the notional number of pints of blood spilled, and for appropriately untoward movies a "vomit meter". A typical such concluding paragraph would be, "No dead bodies. One hundred seventeen breasts. Multiple aardvarking. Lap dancing. Cage dancing. Convenience-store dancing. Blindfold aardvarking. Blind-MAN aardvarking. Lesbo Fu. Pool cue-fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Tane McClure. Joe Bob says check it out." "Aardvarking" is Brigg's euphemism for sexual intercourse. [2][3]
Originally, Brigg's film reviews were limited to pictures shown at local drive-ins. Later, after a tongue-in-cheek 'battle' with his own convictions, he also began reviewing films released on VHS and DVD. Brigg's unabashed fondness for violence, political incorrectness, and female nudity earned him considerable enmity from left-wing feminists, social activists, and bible-belt moralists alike, to the undisguised joy of Bloom and his large fan audience.[neutrality disputed]
Reaction to redevelopment of 42nd Street
During the early 1980s when the City of New York was in the planning stages of renovating and restoring its run-down 42nd Street district, which included closing many grindhouses showing B-movies on double and triple bills around the clock, Joe Bob expressed great opposition. He encouraged a "Postcard Fu" campaign, i.e., encouraging film fans to write to officials and pressure them into saving "the one place in New York City you could see a decent drive-in movie." He felt that 42nd Street movie houses rightfully belonged to all Americans and should be preserved as places where "Charles Bronson can be seen thirty feet high, as God intended".[4]
One man show
An Evening with Joe Bob Briggs, Joe Bob's one-man show, debuted in Cleveland in July 1985. Later re-titled Joe Bob Dead in Concert, it evolved into a theatrical piece involving story- telling, comedy and music that was performed in more than fifty venues over the next two years, including Caroline's in New York, convention centers, theaters, music clubs, comedy clubs, and regular engagements at Wolfgang's and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.
Television
In 1986, as a result of the stage show, Joe Bob was asked to be a guest host on Drive-In Theater, a late- night B-movie show on The Movie Channel, sister network of Showtime. Briggs went over so well that he was eventually signed to a long-term contract. For fourteen movie introductions, he had a side-kick, actor/musician Chris Aable, host of a local Los Angeles TV Show, "Hollywood Today", who played himself while always surrounded by beautiful girls. In one episode at a mansion with Chris Aable and a dozen pretty girls in the swimming pool, Joe Bob stood beside the pool in his cowboy outfit and asked with his trademark redneck accent: "Chris, how come you always get all the women?" Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater became the network's highest-rated show and ran for almost ten years, and was twice nominated for the industry's Cable ACE Award. He appeared on some 50 talk shows, including The Tonight Show (twice) and The Larry King Show. He was also a commentator for a Fox TV news magazine for two seasons.
Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater ended when the network changed format in early 1996. He was off the air for only four months before joining the TNT network, where he hosted MonsterVision for four years. That show ended in July 2000, when once again the network changed format. In the late nineties he spent two seasons as a commentator on Comedy Central's The Daily Show (under his given name John Bloom), with a recurring segment called "God stuff" beginning with the premiere episode.
Writing
During these TV years, Briggs remained active as a writer, working as a contributing editor to the National Lampoon, freelancing for Rolling Stone, Playboy, the Village Voice, and Interview. He was the regular humor columnist and theater critic at the National Review, and he published five books of satire--Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In, A Guide to Western Civilization, or My Story, Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-In, The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs, and Iron Joe Bob, his parody of the men's movement. He also wrote and performed in special shows for Fox and Showtime, and collaborated with veteran comedy writer Norman Steinberg on an NBC sitcom that remains unproduced. His two syndicated newspaper columns--"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" and "Joe Bob's America"-- were picked up by the New York Times Syndicate in the '90s, and he continued to write both until putting the columns on hiatus in 1998. For one year he wrote a humorous sex advice column in Penthouse. In November 2000 he started writing the "Drive-In" column again, this time for United Press International, along with a second column, "The Vegas Guy", which chronicles Joe Bob's weekly forays into the casinos of America. In 2003, Briggs delivered Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History.
In 1998, Bloom retired from writing newspaper reviews, only to return two years later due to popular demand[5] and continue his column as Joe Bob with UPI. Bloom has also appeared on television as a host of TNT's MonsterVision horror movie marathons, and has an internet website, The Joe Bob Report,[6] with collections of movie reviews and other articles.
Briggs was president of the Trinity Foundation of Dallas, Texas, a non-denominational, non-profit public foundation that serves as a religious watchdog group and publishes The Door, a Christian satire magazine, of which Briggs was a regular columnist and investigative reporter. Some of the efforts of Bloom's religious watchdog reporting and satire were featured (under his given name John Bloom) in God Stuff, a regular segment in the first two seasons of The Daily Show. In addition, some of his writing can be seen in Choice: The Best of Reason, a compilation of the libertarian magazine's work over the past four decades. As of Halloween 2007, Briggs is Head Online Doorkeeper of the Wittenburg Door (the misspelling is deliberate), a magazine of religious satire.
Books
Joe Bob Briggs' movie reviews are collected in the now out-of-print books Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In and Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive In. His most recent books, Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History and Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History, contain all-new material. Recently, Briggs has contributed audio commentaries to DVDs released by Media Blasters and Elite Entertainment including Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, The Double-D Avenger, Blood Sisters, Warlock Moon, Samurai Cop, I Spit On Your Grave, and several Ray Dennis Steckler films including The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies and Blood Shack.
Controversy
In 1985, "Briggs" wrote a column about the "We are the world" video, in which he wrote a mocking description of starving African children, and made derogatory comments about the American Negro College Fund. The resulting controversy ended Bloom's position at the Dallas Times Herald, though his syndicated column merely changed distributors.[7][8]
Bibliography
Filmography
- ^ Joe Bob Briggs Biography (1953-)
- ^ Aardvarking List
- ^ JOE BOB'S ADVICE TO THE HOPELESS - "Dear Joe Bob, Why does the term "aardvarking" mean sexual intercourse..."
- ^ Bianco, Anthony (2004). Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block. New York: Harper Collins. p. 230. ISBN 0-688-17089-7.
- ^ Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In - November 14, 2000
- ^ The Joe Bob Report
- ^ "Joe Bob in Bloom", Dallas Observer
- ^ Calvin Trillin, American Chronicles, “THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOE BOB BRIGGS, SO FAR,” The New Yorker, December 22, 1986, p. 73
External links
