In print, Joe Bob Briggs-noted critic of the kind of movies you can`t help watching on late-night cable TV and might go see at a drive-in, if you could find one-sounds like this:
Thirteen breasts. Eight dead bodies. Branding iron through the eyes. Cross-nailing. Multiple throat-slitting. Blood-sucking. Nude back-stabbing. Devil sex. Ax in casket. Exploding casket. Exploding crypt. Gratuitous supporting-actress skinny-dipping. Witchcraft Fu. Lesbo Fu. Jugular Fu.
Then he nominates the movie`s lead actors for Drive-In Academy Awards and gives the film, in this case ”The Haunting of Morella,” 1/2 stars.
He also sounds like this in print, from a piece about generic disc jockeys and what he has learned performing standup comedy:
The guy who introduces you is always named Murphy in the Morning.
”Hi!” he says, extending a soul handshake. ”Murphy in the Morning.”
It`s evening, and so Murphy in the Morning looks like Death in the Afternoon. He wears a rumpled Morning Zoo Crew sweatshirt. His hair is matted. And he has that staple of the radio journeyman: rock-and-roll skin.
Then Joe Bob proceeds to explain that rock-and-roll skin looks like ”an old sailor`s duffel bag” and that going from writing a newspaper column to doing standup comedy is hard, especially when all the Murphys in America`s mornings keep insisting to crowds that you are a ”wild man,” when really you`re more of a mild-mannered man who has written and learned to tell some very funny stories.
Briggs, after all, is the pen and stage name for John Bloom, a former newspaper and magazine feature writer and ”straight” movie critic to whom a whole pickup truckful of funny things happened on the way to his pension, not the least of them being developing this Joe Bob Briggs character and occupying him coming on nine years now, through good times and bad.
It may be a side effect of the disappearance of drive-in theaters. It may mean simply that the 38-year-old Bloom is getting tired of coming up with new modifiers for ”Fu.” But Joe Bob Briggs, in this new decade, is spending less time gazing at extraneous sex and violence and more at his own navel, or at least at the world beyond the really big screen.
Six-foot-four before he puts his sharkskin boots on, Briggs is, almost literally, going uptown. He`s even moving from Dallas, urban heart of Joe Bob country, to New York City, pictures of which are in the rural dictionary illustrating the phrase ”hell on Earth.”
He defends the change to uncharacteristic scenery by saying, ”I`ve always said I would never do anything that violates my personal code of ethics. However, I would do anything for money.”
The real America
The move comes because he is developing a show for the New York-based Showtime cable network that will be called ”Joe Bob`s America,” also the name of the newer of his two syndicated newspaper columns. (Bloom says that both ”America,” his broader look at life begun in 1988, and the veteran
”Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In” run in about 100 papers, but that the newer column ”is actually faster growing.”)
He describes the show-in-progress as ”like a parody of Charles Kuralt:
Joe Bob and his crew working at a fictional but pitiful public broadcasting network, and they go out to find the American myth, and instead they find the real America-which is not a pretty sight.”
Meanwhile, after two books about drive-in movies and another that was a sort of autobiography, his newest, ”The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs”
(Random House, $17.95), consists of pieces that have almost nothing to do with movies at all, unless you count one about ”The Last Temptation of Christ.” (”One thing I like about this Jesus, compared to the 11-hour miniseries Jesus, is that this guy doesn`t mess around. He does the Sermon on the Mount in, like, two minutes.”)
The new book`s essays are more in the vein of what is called social commentary, and they have titles like ”Letter to the Ayatollah,” ”Discover Atomic Utah!” and ”I Burned the Flag (I Think).”
So what we seem to have, to use a word that Joe Bob would hate but that his alter ego could use properly in a sentence, is the Joe Bob Briggs dichotomy.
On the one hand, there is Joe Bob the semi-rabid redneck grooving on the kind of on-screen occurrences that would offend opera-goers.
On the other, there is Joe Bob the cultural critic, who still uses Texas dialect such as ”ever” for ”every,” but from time to time sounds in print a lot like you suspect John Bloom used to sound, before this long-playing fantasy began.
`Equal opportunity offender`
It started in Dallas, in 1982. Bloom, who grew up in Texas and Arkansas, graduated from Vanderbilt University and was an otherwise respectable young man employed at the Times Herald, had an idea: ”What if something happened to (New York Times film critic) Vincent Canby`s brain one night, and he woke up in the morning and he no longer liked the movie `Gandhi,` but he loved `Dr. Butcher, M.D.`?”
So Bloom came up with, as Calvin Trillin put it when he wrote about Joe Bob in The New Yorker back in 1986, ”a fictional drive-in movie customer who was actually able to distinguish between a successful zombie-surfing movie and a zombie-surfing movie that didn`t quite work.”
”Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In,” the satirical and often hilarious column, was a roaring success, and Briggs/Bloom became the paper`s star, even as many there worried, according to Trillin`s account, that he would sooner or later push the character`s intolerant take on life too far.
But going too far, being ”an equal opportunity offender,” Bloom says, was, in a way, the point; he has described the column as ”a weekly comic stink bomb tossed into the boring gray matter of the American newspaper.”
In 1985, the bomb finally did more than emit a funny odor when he wrote a parody of the celebrity famine-relief song ”We Are the World,” titled ”We Are the Weird.”
The song made sport of starvation, and the column in which it appeared also was deemed highly offensive by, most important, black men and women in Dallas. It was far from the first time Joe Bob had offended an ethnic or other group, but it was the first time the outcry was so strong. The paper printed an apology on the front page.
Bloom, offended at what he saw as the paper`s failure to support him for doing something he had been doing all along, resigned.
New directions
Now, from the perspective of more than five years and from the comfort of a national book tour in which he is being put up in hotel rooms that have couches and dining tables, he calls the ”We Are the Weird” controversy ”the best thing that ever happened to me.”
”A whole lot of people discovered the column that probably never would have, but the main thing is it pushed me in different directions,” he says.
”I looked around for where you could go, where you could speak with freedom. And one place you could go was the standup comedy stage, and another is cable TV, especially premium cable TV, where you don`t have advertisers.” So he does standup, and, since 1986, has hosted the Saturday night (10 p.m. CST) feature ”Joe Bob`s Drive-In Theater” on The Movie Channel, Showtime`s sister station.
All his books have appeared since the controversy. No less a figure in humor writing than Dave Barry chips in with an enthusiastic blurb on the newest one. As an ”act of defiance,” Bloom named his 3,000-subscriber newsletter ”We Are the Weird.” And he is, American Airlines has told him, in its top 1 percent of frequent fliers.
Plus, he has discovered a curious, but not unwelcome, constituency: ”I`m a big favorite with fanzine editors and with heavy metal headbanger garage bands,” he says. ”So I`ve got every hard-core metal tape ever made in America, and I`ve got every fanzine ever put out by anybody on any subject. But that`s great because I`m glad to be on the side of the misfits.”
In the new book he goes after, to name just a few targets, cookie-cutter urban malls: ”The next time I come to your town, for any reason, do not take me to where it used to be a slum but now it`s Riverplace Courtyard-on-the-Square Plaza.”
The producers at ”National Public Communist Radio”: ” `You know, we have an obligation to the public to produce shows about one-legged religious nuts in Bozeman, Mont., who live in Indian hogans made out of mud and their own spit.”`
And ”The McLaughlin Group”: ”The first show that looks like it was put together by alcoholic wrestling promoters. Right away, McLaughlin . . . starts screaming into the camera like a bullfrog on acid: `In New Hampshire it`s clear that the gloves are off! Pat!` This is an animal trainer`s command for Pat Buchanan to bark out the first two or three words that come to his mind. . . .”
”I`ve always gone after every target indiscriminately,” he says. ”It`s like a machine gun on a swivel. You hit this target and this target and this target and this target, and about one in twenty`ll scream. So you hit them 20 more times. That`s how it works. That`s how you find the sacred cow and then destroy the sacred cow.”
