A MonsterVision Christmas: Rusty the TNT Mailgirl and Joe Bob Briggs (or is it John Bloom?) tape a holiday special at AMS Studios in Addison.

Or:

Joe Bob: "Rusty, would you like to go out sometime and have a soda or a glass of milk?"

Rusty: "You like milk?"

Joe Bob: "I love milk. I was breast-fed until I was 14."

After flubbing a line in another segment, Rusty gamely admits to a crew member: "Well, I wasn't hired for my line readings." That's right, she was hired to be ogled by Joe Bob Briggs every Saturday night between such American film classics as Phantasm II, Maximum Overdrive, and The Fog.

Most of the Advice to the Hopeless skits shown during movie intermissions are, to be fair, the unfunniest segments of the six or so bits Joe Bob tapes for each MonsterVision flick. In two-minute helpings, the man can make you laugh with his surgical fusion of highbrow and lowbrow, arcane movie knowledge, and offhand riffing about the criminal-justice system and the concept of male feminists. But he always takes time to say why every MonsterVision movie is special using a rating system more imaginative than the Motion Picture Association of America has ever doled out. Maximum Overdrive, for instance, features: "Twenty dead bodies, one possible breast, one dead dog, six quarts of blood, 12 exploding trucks, little leaguers massacred for no reason, vending-machine fu, bazooka fu, garbage-truck fu." And, of course, the inevitable Briggs endorsement: "Check it out."

"The Joe Bob character and his persona was a logical extension of what he saw as the mystery of God."

But spend a few hours hanging around the MonsterVision set, and you're plagued with one overarching question: Who is this man? He calls himself Joe Bob Briggs for the camera, but you have to wonder if the columnist who began syndicating Joe Bob nationally in 1984, toured with his own one-man show, and hosted nudity-laced trash films for The Movie Channel hasn't thrown his fans for a loop with this version of his creation: He doesn't wear a cowboy hat anymore, his accent has softened, his observations on life in these United States have gone from crude diatribes to philosophical mini-treatises, and he plugs some fairly highfalutin references — for a loudmouth redneck, anyway — into his shtick: Aristotle, the film career of Edward Dmytryk, the Dorothy Parker biopic Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, performance art, and the sometimes controversial off-Broadway house Manhattan Theatre Club. Are these allusions that your average MonsterVision viewers can hip to?

Those who know that Joe Bob Briggs' real name is John Bloom, and that this Dallas native, now age 45, wrote brilliant investigative pieces for Texas Monthly in the late '70s as well as peerless movie criticism and "Metro" columns for the Dallas Times Herald and D Magazine through the mid-'80s, are burdened with even more confusion. Stand at the sidelines and watch him tape those MonsterVision interludes, and you see this man channel-surf among identities. Witness him between takes on the set, solitary and poring over the pages of his script, and you get a sense of the soft-spoken, somber-eyed, insular literature major who graduated first in his class at Vanderbilt. Notice him pace quietly and intensely with a pronounced limp inflicted by a childhood bout with polio, and you see him as the humble, sage-like member and teacher of the nondenominational Christian group Trinity Foundation, for whom he also serves as national spokesman every week in the "Godstuff" segments of Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

For many who remember John Bloom and the compassionate eye and eloquent voice he brought to his journalism, the question has long been this: Have the fat paycheck and national attention made him cling so long to Joe Bob Briggs, who is entertaining at best and bruisingly repetitive at worst?

The answer isn't simple — which is just what you'd expect from anyone as complex and enigmatic as John Bloom: A tangle of material and spiritual motives keep him attached to his bubba-esque alter ego. But you could argue that if Bloom on TNT still bears the brand name Joe Bob Briggs, he has begun to wriggle out of the crusty shell of that lucrative hibernation. Talk to the man, read his old stuff, and watch him on TV as both MonsterVision and "Godstuff" showman, and you might draw this conclusion: Joe Bob Briggs is slowly morphing back into John Bloom before your very eyes.