Love Quote by Joe Bob Briggs

A tidy little grenade of modern manners: we treat our own phone like an organ and everyone else’s like an air horn. Joe Bob Briggs lands the joke in the word “apparently,” a mock shrug that pretends he’s merely reporting an odd social fact, when he’s really indicting a whole culture of self-exemption. The line works because it captures a hypocrisy that feels both petty and damning: the device is “mine” when it’s convenience, connection, productivity, or comfort; it’s “yours” when it’s noise, narcissism, and intrusion.

The subtext is less about technology than about entitlement. Your phone use is read as a claim on shared space - the restaurant, the theater, the sidewalk, the living room. My phone use is framed as necessary, even virtuous: I’m coordinating, I’m working, I’m checking on someone. Briggs compresses that asymmetry into a single contrast, exposing the way we narrate our own behavior as context-rich and everyone else’s as context-free.

As a critic, Briggs is also poking at the thin line between private life and public performance. Cell phones turned boredom into content, silence into a chance to scroll, and every moment into something that can be interrupted. The reason the line sticks is that it doesn’t demand we renounce the phone; it demands we admit the real problem: not the gadget, but our insistence that our interruptions deserve grace while others’ deserve contempt.