Joe Bob Briggs (1953–)

Joe Bob Briggs is a Texas-based film critic, television host, and author who rose to media fame from the back pages of the Dallas Times-Herald thanks to his biting “redneck” wit and drive-in movie reviews that tallied blood, breasts, and beasts. Briggs was created as a pseudonym for columnist John Bloom, who was born in Texas but raised in Little Rock (Pulaski County), after he became the newspaper’s film critic and discovered his abhorrence for mainstream movies and his love for exploitation cinema.

John Irving Bloom was born on January 27, 1953, in Dallas, Texas, to Rudoph Bloom, who was an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent and lawyer, and Thelma Berry Bloom, who was a schoolteacher. Bloom’s family moved around for his father’s promotions, settling in Little Rock in 1963. Bloom was exposed to cinema early, accompanying his father to movies and attending the Razorback Twin Drive-In with his family.

Bloom’s journalism career began at the Arkansas Democrat, where he was hired at thirteen years old to cover sports. Bloom would work at the paper before school and cover games at night. He became the main high school sports and golf writer and served as the locker-room interviewer at Razorback football games. Bloom attended Parkview High School as part of its founding class, graduating in 1971 after an industrious scholastic career. He wrote for the school paper, played in the band, attended Arkansas Boys State, and was student council president his senior year.

Bloom attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and wrote for the school paper, later becoming managing editor. He worked as a reporter after college, landing at the Times-Herald in 1976. Briggs married Joyce Karns in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce less than a year later.

Bloom’s column under the Briggs nom de plume—“Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In”—debuted in 1982 and became one of the paper’s most popular features. It was syndicated, reaching about four million readers by 1985. But in the spring of that year, Briggs’s satirizing of the fundraising anthem “We Are the World” led to accusations of racism, and the paper canceled the column. Bloom resigned days later. The Briggs column continued in syndication, and Bloom began to embrace his alter ego, telling a reporter Bloom was “pretty much dead….When it became apparent that Joe Bob’s fee was about twice what John Bloom’s was, I knew something had changed.”

Joe Bob Briggs expanded into television in the late 1980s, hosting exploitation and horror films on The Movie Channel (TMC) with Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater. He anchored a similar feature in the 1990s on TNT’s MonsterVision. Briggs also continued to write, authoring several books and producing freelance pieces. Briggs married Paula Bowen in 1988; this marriage also ended in divorce. He has no children.

Briggs often wove fanciful anecdotes about Arkansas into his commentary. In one episode of MonsterVision, Briggs urged viewers to have sympathy for the state’s struggling pig farmers: “We shouldn’t joke about pigs right now, though. I was in Arkansas over the holidays. They were givin’ away hogs….They had 16-cents a pound pork in some places. And the hog in Arkansas is sacred. I used to live there—Woo Pig Sooie, ya know?”

In Briggs’s farcical autobiography, A Guide to Western Civilization or My Story, he recounted the tragic death of Orville Stubbs, coach of the University of Arkansas (UA) freshman football team; Stubbs was so famous in the state that Pike County asked to bury some of Stubbs’s remains on its courthouse grounds.

A staple on cable TV for almost two decades, Briggs left the medium when MonsterVision was canceled in 2000. Joking that he had been “off the air for centuries,” Briggs returned in 2018 with a new show, The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, on the streaming platform Shudder. Briggs’s return was greeted with so much fanfare that the traffic crashed Shudder’s servers on the show’s debut. Originally planned as a farewell special, The Last Drive-In was renewed for a sixth season in September 2023.

Alongside his hosting duties, Briggs continues to write and tour the country, asserting that “the drive-in will never die.”

For additional information:
Allen, Jacquie. “MonsterVision: An Oral History and Interview with Joe Bob Briggs.” Horror Obsessive, June 13, 2018. https://horrorobsessive.com/2018/06/13/an-oral-history-and-interview-with-joe-bob-briggs-monstervision/ (accessed July 18, 2024).

Briggs, Joe Bob. A Guide to Western Civilization or My Story. New York: Delacorte Press, 1988.

Brummett, John. “How John Bloom Became Joe Bob Briggs.” Arkansas Times, August 1991, pp. 48–51, 68–70.

Fowler, Jimmy. “Joe Bob in Bloom.” Dallas Observer, December 17, 1998. https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/joe-bob-in-bloom-6401265 (accessed July 18, 2024).

Hallock, Jeremy. “Tonight, Former Dallas Movie Critic Joe Bob Briggs Brings Us Some ‘Redneck Joy.’” Dallas Morning News, December 9, 2018. https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/movies/2018/12/09/movie-critic-joe-bob-briggs-goes-to-the-drive-in-for-a-new-generation-of-digital-fans/ (accessed July 18, 2024).

Joe Bob Briggs. https://joebobbriggs.com/ (accessed July 18, 2024).

Topich, Al. “Joe Bob Briggs Reminisces about the Democrat.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, December 20, 2024, pp. 1E, 6E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/dec/19/film-scene-opinion-joe-bob-briggs-reminisces/ (accessed December 30, 2024).

———. “Joe Bob Briggs Still Relevant These Days.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, December 13, 2024, pp. 1E, 6E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/dec/12/film-scene-opinion-horror-movie-host-joe-bob/ (accessed December 13, 2024).

———. “Joe Bob Briggs Talks Movies and Arkansas.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 26, 2023, pp. 1E, 6E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/may/26/joe-bob-briggs-talks-movies-and-arkansas/ (accessed July 18, 2024).

Brandon Howard
Fayetteville, Arkansas