When you ask Bloom point-blank if Joe Bob Briggs is now just John Bloom sitting in a fake trailer-park set every Saturday night on TNT, his answer is factual and, as always, not quite revealing: "Joe Bob has always been John Bloom. I've tried never to say anything as Joe Bob Briggs that I don't believe as John Bloom. I just exaggerate it."

As it turns out, there are some fairly circumstantial reasons why the MonsterVision Joe Bob looks, talks, and acts differently than did the Joe Bob of The Movie Channel and past syndicated columns. On the issue of the relaxed accent, Jim Atkinson reminds people, "Even before he invented Joe Bob and did that outsized rube voice, John had a decent Texas-Arkansas accent. It wasn't all that great a leap for him to talk like a hillbilly."

Atkinson scores a direct hit on this one: Today, John Bloom sitting in a hotel lounge chatting sounds almost exactly like Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision, just a little more hushed.

Tanja Lindstrom is the associate producer for MonsterVision, and she's been an assistant to John Bloom for the past eight years on all things Joe Bob.

"When you go back to his first season on the Movie Channel, especially, you'll notice that Joe Bob was rougher, scragglier, much more of a redneck type," Lindstrom explains. "But moving from The Movie Channel to TNT is a move from a subscription channel to basic cable. John has to tone it down; he can't say the word, 'retard,' for instance, or any obscenities. If you'll notice, a running gag on MonsterVision now is all the things TNT won't let Joe Bob do."

As for shedding the cowboy hat, she continues, "That was a purely technical consideration. John didn't care one way or the other. We'd heard it was a lighting nightmare at The Movie Channel, so we decided to drop it."

And the reason "Godstuff" on Comedy Central's The Daily Show depicts John Bloom at that pulpit surrounded by stained glass rather than Joe Bob Briggs is equally happenstance. On the final shoot of his "Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater" for The Movie Channel, Bloom deliberately scheduled some extra time in the studio and, with the help of his brethren at the Trinity Foundation, compiled a short video called "Joe Bob's Godstuff," with the Grapevine movie critic

Godstuff from The Daily Show Bob Tilton The Doors of Heaven Death Penalty for Homos Requires RealPlayer

himself lobbing stones at national televangelists at their most absurd, acquisitive, and hypocritical. They shopped it around to many broadcast venues, although there was resistance from independent and network affiliate stations because they rely heavily on religious groups filling odd-hour programming slots. Madelyn Smith, the Comedy Central producer who was then creating "The Daily Show," called up Bloom and said she loved it. Bloom says Smith said hell no to the Joe Bob persona, declaring pseudonyms by correspondents verboten.

Bloom says: "When the fans write me and say, 'Why are you this other guy on Comedy Central called John Bloom?' I say, let me put it this way: Ted Turner made me sign a contract saying I wouldn't work for any other cable company, and there's a guy on Comedy Central who looks like me, and that's all I'm gonna say. But it's good for visibility. People can watch one channel and see Joe Bob, then switch to another and see John Bloom."

With the Trinity Foundation producing "Godstuff" (they write a preliminary script with Bloom, collect the televangelist clips, record them on the editor-friendly Beta format, and send them off to Comedy Central) and Joe Bob Briggs serving as "associate high sheriff" and contributing writer for Trinity's satirical magazine The Door, it's tempting for anyone armed with even a smidgen of knowledge about Bloom's religious conversion and Ole Anthony's teachings to see the current TV versions of Bloom and Briggs as a two-headed hydra hissing at two different targets: one head lunging for secular culture, both intellectual and mainstream, while the other snaps at organized religion.

John Bloom's favorite description of Joe Bob may be as a machine gun firing rounds with a 360-degree range at sacred cows, but there exists a visionary agenda behind his kamikaze satire as surely as there is behind the work of feminists and gay rights and civil rights activists. These "sacred cows" are, to John Bloom — the Trinity Foundation teacher — Trojan constructions inside which cower the fallible, solipsistic minds of humankind. With the help of his machine gun, Joe Bob becomes one more weapon to expose the vanity of man, his hypocritical thinking, and his intellectual conceits, a vehicle to unmask the chaos that will leave him with no choice but to turn to God. Or so says the Trinity Foundation.

Chances are, you will never hear this spelled out by Joe Bob sitting outside his trailer home with a beer can introducing Maximum Overdrive or gawking at the TNT Mailgirl. Nor, for that matter, will the religious satire John Bloom spins on "Godstuff" ever quite elucidate what it promotes, sticking as satire does to the business of destruction. Bloom as Joe Bob "The Exegete" Briggs, writing for The Door, does indulge in a little Biblical expounding with essays like "The Homo Verses," in which he compares homosexual and heterosexual perversity through some research into the Greek origins of key words in Romans 1:26-28.

When asked if there is a preacher component to Joe Bob Briggs, John Bloom, replies, "Oh, yeah, absolutely that's part of it. But I think that's true of every comic, once they get that platform. I would even use the word 'pulpit.' One of the things you do from a pulpit is destroy everyone's complacency, and that's what Joe Bob does. I'll be preaching like crazy if I do a new live one-man show as Joe Bob that I want to."

In addition to a script for a Joe Bob movie that Bloom has been working on for three years (plans to film it last fall fell through), the two other projects dearest to Bloom's heart right now are a national tour as Joe Bob ("I'd like to model it after Bill Cosby, who is fearless; none of the fart jokes or garbanzo crap, just 10- or 15-minute stories without traditional punch lines") to which TNT might lend a producing hand, and a one-man show as the legendarily venomous late-19th-century satirist Ambrose Bierce. That would be John Bloom billed as Bierce, not Joe Bob; Bloom is researching how Bierce, an East Coast patrician transplanted to San Francisco, might have sounded. These efforts will presumably stretch the abilities of supporting actor Bloom, who was no doubt tantalized into honing his acting skills by his work in various cameo and supporting roles in feature films, especially his square-off with Robert DeNiro in Casino, released in 1995. Bloom claims his busy schedule left him with no choice but to kill the syndicated Joe Bob columns, which he last penned in 1997.

So, 13 years after being angrily denounced in Dallas and feeling betrayed by colleagues he thinks didn't sufficiently defend him, John Bloom is starting to peek out from behind the cardboard cutout juggernaut that is Joe Bob Briggs. Many people have wondered whether Bloom is trapped behind the drive-in movie critic from Grapevine, unwilling to give up a lifestyle that is considerably more comfortable than that of a prestigious writer of nonfiction and uncertain whether the name John Bloom at this juncture in his life will arouse the interest of magazine and publishing editors. Or, to phrase it as Skip Hollandsworth does, "He has spent so many years fulfilling the character of Joe Bob, which is fine. But people have wondered why at the same time he didn't fulfill the John Bloom part of him. He could easily be Frank Rich right now."

"Over the years," says Ole Anthony, "John has talked to me about dropping Joe Bob Briggs, and I tell him in my opinion, he's crazy. Joe Bob has given John a lifestyle most people only dream about. He's climbed on this horse, and now it's taking him on a journey to some destination, except that I think John started off on a donkey and now he's up to a quarter horse."

At this point, would John Bloom be able to chuck fame and big money for the more austere world of nonfiction and commentary?

"I don't think it would be incredibly difficult," Bloom says. "And I want to write another book as John Bloom, because the proudest thing I've ever done is Evidence of Love. Most of the stuff I've done I don't look at again, but that's the only thing I can look back on and say, 'I couldn't have done a better job.' I have two books left on my contract and a very good relationship with my publisher, Grove Atlantic. I think any reasonable book I came to him with he would approve. Of course, he would rather have Joe Bob."

John Bloom understands that the sensitively explored investigation of love, lust, and axe-wielding hate that is Evidence of Love belongs in the nonfiction novel genre pioneered by Capote and Mailer. Can he be satisfied churning out 7,000 pages a year of MonsterVision vignettes?

It's easy to think that this career transformation is a freakishly disappointing case of a "butterfly turning into a worm." Yet there truly is more to the new Joe Bob than breast jokes and body counts. His champions are right to point out that the most recent Joe Bob Briggs repertoire can combine blue-collar machismo and art-film appreciation in cleverly anarchic ways. For instance, when Joe Bob discusses Dolores Claiborne for an upcoming segment, he recounts a curious phenomenon in the career of that film's co-star Jennifer Jason Leigh: the fact that her characters have performed oral sex on male characters in movie after movie after movie. Yet those oft-ribbed TNT censors will allow him to describe this sexual act only as "something guys like," a pretty vague implication. The punch line to the laundry list of filmic fellatio, Joe Bob recounts, was his critical revelation: This on-screen habit explains the "lockjaw" way she spoke as Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a mannered delivery that mystified some critics.

John Bloom, the film critic who used to haunt the Inwood regularly when he worked at the Times Herald and write essays on the emergence of novelle vague in European films, would of course know this stuff. The crew members on the set of MonsterVision that Saturday afternoon, many of whom have been with Joe Bob Briggs for a while and are avowed fans, would've dug the fellatio references if TNT allowed him to come out and make them. But they were, to a man, pretty oblivious of the critical dissent over Mrs. Parker and Jennifer Jason Leigh's career. They just didn't get the joke.

"There's a merging going on," Ole Anthony acknowledges. "Many of his old colleagues don't understand why he's stuck with Joe Bob for so long. They think he's wasting his talent. But he sees it as a spiritual tool. And to keep it from dying, he has no choice but to evolve and begin including those kinds of allusions."