Joy Behar

Josephine Victoria "Joy" Behar, born Josephine Victoria Occhiuto on October 7, 1942, is an American comedian, television host, actress, and playwright. She is best known as an original co-host of the ABC daytime talk show The View. Across a multi-decade career, she has performed in television, stand-up comedy, radio, film, and theater, in addition to authoring several books.

Behar was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as the only child of an Italian-American Roman Catholic family. Her mother worked as a seamstress and her father was a truck driver for Coca-Cola. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in sociology from Queens College in 1964 and a Master of Arts in English education from Stony Brook University in 1966. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, she taught English at Lindenhurst Senior High School on Long Island before studying acting at the HB Studio.

Her show business career began in the early 1980s as a receptionist and producer on Good Morning America. Performing stand-up comedy, she appeared on Lorne Michaels's NBC project The New Show and hosted the Lifetime talk show Way Off Broadway in 1987, which featured Larry David. She also hosted Live from Queens, worked on 77 WABC radio, appeared on NBC's Baby Boom, and acted in minor film roles such as Cookie, This Is My Life, and Manhattan Murder Mystery.

In 1997, Behar became an original panelist on ABC's daytime talk show The View, co-created by Barbara Walters. Starting as a substitute for Walters, she ultimately became a permanent co-host. In 2009, Behar and co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sherri Shepherd, and Walters won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. She left the show in August 2013 to pursue other projects but returned as a regular co-host in September 2015.

Behar has hosted several of her own news and talk programs. She anchored The Joy Behar Show on HLN from 2009 to 2011 while simultaneously co-hosting The View. She later hosted Joy Behar: Say Anything! on Current TV from 2012 to 2013, and Late Night Joy on TLC in 2015. Additionally, she served as a fill-in host on Larry King Live and Current TV's Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer.

In theater and publishing, Behar has performed in stage productions including The Food Chain, The Vagina Monologues, Love, Loss and What I Wore, and her one-woman show Me, My Mouth and I, while her debut play My First Ex-Husband premiered Off-Broadway in 2025. Her books include Joy Shtick, Sheetzucacapoopoo: My Kind of Dog, and The Great Gasbag. She was married to Joseph Behar from 1965 to 1981, with whom she has a daughter, and married Steve Janowitz in 2011.