Joe Bob Briggs

Joe Bob Briggs

Joe Bob Briggs is the drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, Texas, currently resident in New York City, where his pop culture commentary appears in print, on television and at various dive bars that defy the modern world by allowing the smoking of cigars.

Cameras Are Making Us Stupid

AUSTIN—Pretty soon now, I’m counting on it, somebody is gonna fly to Fiji, rent a bamboo villa that sits on stilts over the lapping waves hitting the pristine seashore, order a fruity drink in a coconut shell, stretch out on a veranda that juts out into an inlet where porpoises frolic and play, ...

Oklahoma City

Let’s Make Up Some Unenforceable Laws, Come On, It’ll Be Fun

OKLAHOMA CITY—Maybe I’m naive about this, but I have to assume that anyone who gets elected to a state legislature, whether you’re in California or Alabama or Rhode Island, has been exposed at some point in his life to a civics class. At my school it was a required course in ninth grade. You ...

Michaelangelo's David

Photoshop Me, Please

TULSA, Okla.—I’ve been flipping through a website called Exposing Celeb Surgery. The goal of the publisher seems to be: humiliation. Here you have various models, actresses, influencers, YouTube personalities, Patreon performers—99 percent of them are women—and you see a professional photo ...

Who’s Afraid of the Joker?

TAMPA—I dressed up as the Joker on Halloween and absolutely no one was scared. I didn't get kicked out of public places. I wasn’t suspected of being a serial killer on my way to a murder spree. Nobody mistook me for a revolutionary trying to inflame the disenfranchised populace. In fact, ...

Getty Center Museum, Los Angeles

Thank God, the Shar-Pei Puppies and the Manet Paintings Are All Safe

ORLANDO—They’re calling it the Getty Fire, because it started up by Mulholland Drive just north of the Getty Museum, which sits on a precipice overlooking the San Diego Freeway, better known as the Four-Oh-Five. It instantly engulfed 600 acres and destroyed a half-dozen homes and by the third ...

Prosecutors Gone Wild

CLEVELAND—Investigation Discovery, the true-crime documentary channel, is running a promo for a new show hosted by a former federal prosecutor, Sunny Hostin, called Truth About Murder, and it has all the usual clichéd cuts and fades spotlighting our intrepid reporter with various expressions of ...

A 20-Hour Flight Can Be FUN!

PHOENIXVILLE, Pa.—Let’s look on the bright side of the new 20-hour nonstop flight between New York and Sydney. Personally I don’t expect to ever be that desperate to get to Sydney. I’m more likely to fly to El Lay, stay a few days, continue to Maui, spend a few days watching whales, proceed ...

David Lee Roth

Travel by Luxury Donkey Cart

LOS ANGELES—It was David Lee Roth who ruined personal-appearance contracts for all time with his Brown M&M’s Clause in the ’80s. The story sounds apocryphal but it’s true: Any promoter hiring Van Halen for a concert was required to supply M&M’s in the band’s dressing room but ...

Man Bites Dog, but Nobody Cares

DALLAS—So yesterday there was a headline in my newsfeed: SCIENTISTS CURE COMMON COLD It was the 85th link in my newsfeed, so I assumed it was some kind of advertising come-on for cold medications. It was actually an article by the Beauty and Style Editor for Yahoo reporting on research at ...

Say That Again, I WILL Kick Your Ass

NEW YORK—I don’t mind it when you lie to me with marketing terms or puff me up with overblown predictions—I’m in show business, that’s what we do—but stop using these words that are designed to disguise what you’re really doing to me. If you really wanna piss me off, use any of the ...


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