John Irving Bloom (born January 27, 1953), known by the stage name Joe Bob Briggs, is an American syndicated film critic, writer, actor, and comic performer. He is known for having hosted Joe Bob's Drive-in Theater on The Movie Channel from 1986 to 1996, the TNT television series MonsterVision from 1996 to 2000, and The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder beginning in 2018. In 2019, he was named the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards' Monster Kid of the Year. Early years John Irving Bloom was born January 27, 1953, in Dallas, Texas, the son of Thelma Louise (née Berry) and Rudolph Lewis Bloom. Bloom was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and by age 13 was a sportswriter at what was then the Arkansas Democrat. He won a Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he majored in English and wrote for the student newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler. After graduating in 1975. he became a reporter for Dallas Times Herald and later wrote for Texas Monthly magazine. Taking a leave of absence from the newspaper in order to co-write (with Jim Atkinson) his many books, the true crime book Evidence of Love (later adapted as the TV-movie A Killing in a Small Town), he supported himself by writing movie reviews for the paper. There he created the humorous persona of "Joe Bob Briggs" to review exploitation films and other genre movies. Persona Bloom's acting persona as "Briggs" is that of an unapologetic redneck Texan with an avowed love of the drive-in theaters. 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 woman troubles and high-spirited brushes with the law, which inevitably conclude with his rush to catch a movie at a local drive-in, usually with female companionship. "Briggs" revealed in an interview that he intended the character to have an ambiguous sounding name and initially thought of calling himself "Bubba Rodriguez", but was told that the name Rodriguez would be perceived as racist and decided to go with: "The whitest name I could come up with." The reviews typically end with a brief rating of the movie in question's "high points", including the types of action (represented by nouns naming objects used