Joy Behar: No One Ever Said, ‘Be Quiet’
Some many years ago, Joy Behar found herself on the receiving end of being taunted, behavior she typically instigates, not endures. She was performing one of her first comedic routines — she began her career when she was almost 40 — as an opener for the drummer Buddy Rich. The audience consisted of other drummers from Queens, and as Ms. Behar stood in front of them, they all banged the tables with their drumsticks. “Typical nightmare,” said Ms. Behar, who is now 72, shaking her head.
Nowadays the roles have flipped; Ms. Behar’s audience is tamer, but she may not be. Audiences will see for themselves this weekend when she takes the stage at Guild Hall for her one-woman play called “Me, My Mouth & I,” a nod to her “big mouth.” It will run tomorrow and Saturday at 8 p.m., with tickets from $48 to $150.
The show, which also ran last winter at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan, chronicles the comedian’s rise to fame and her journey from poverty and divorce to the comedic limelight as a co-host on ABC-TV’s “The View” for 16 years, a film actress, and an entertainer on TV talk shows.
She was born in 1942 in Brooklyn to a large Italian-American family who encouraged her to perform in front of them at the ripe age of 4, dancing and singing, tapping her heels, and belting out lyrics at the dinner table. She tells about it in the play, how she became the “Shirley Temple of Metropolitan Avenue” and addicted to applause. No one ever told her to be quiet, and she took advantage of it.
Ms. Behar came of age during the 1960s and ’70s when becoming a professional comedian remained mostly a man’s aspiration. “It wasn’t exactly on the agenda to stand up in front of a crowd of people and make them laugh,” she said. “Girls are funny. We were just trained not to be funny so the boys wouldn’t be upset. Let’s face it, they want to be the funny ones. It’s hard, because the men are running the business usually.”
It was a man, though, the stand-up comedian from the Bronx Robert Klein, who gave Ms. Behar much of her inspiration. She looked to his material chronicling his job as a teacher and growing up in a poor New York neighborhood, saw some of her life in his, and related to it.
Ms. Behar struggled fitting in at a number of jobs before she found comedy. She was a high school English teacher, she worked in a mental hospital (which, she said, prepared her for “The View”); she tried her hand at employment counseling, and she was a secretary. She felt unhappy in each position. She loved making people laugh, including her high school students, and started to wonder if she could make a living at it.
At the time she began her career, she was broke and divorced from Joe Behar, a college professor. Looking back, she’s glad she was a late bloomer, because her age and experiences provided fodder for her material. She thinks if she’d started at 19 or “in utero,” there wouldn’t have been anything worth talking about.
In 1997, she landed a spot as an original panelist on “The View” alongside Barbara Walters, and was joined throughout the years by such celebrities as Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sherri Shepherd, and Star Jones. Ms. Behar, who is known for her candid, vocal, and blunt style, was frequently involved in heated dramas on the set. In 2007, for one, with Rosie O’Donnell and Ms. Hasselbeck, on opposite sides about the war in Iraq, having a blowout as the cameras rolled, she could be seen sitting between them, screaming through fits of laughter, “Let’s have a conversation!”
Another now-infamous scene involved Ms. Jones, who had called into the show to talk about her elective surgery for breast implants. Ms. Behar interrupted, through more laughter, “Okay, Star! That’s enough about you. On to us. Bye!” And was bleeped out after adding, “Keep your tits perky.”
She uses material about her former co-hosts on “The View” for “Me, My Mouth & I.” “I have a little story about Barbara,” she said of Ms. Walters last Saturday afternoon in her East Hampton house, flashing a sly smile. “I’m not mean, I’m a little edgy, but I try not to be mean. But you have to be edgy, otherwise nobody pays attention.”
Ms. Behar first started coming to the South Fork during her years at Queens College. Her sorority, Delta Zeta, had a house in Hampton Bays. Since then, she’s owned a house in Sagaponack, rented in Sag Harbor and elsewhere, and for the last three years has been in East Hampton.
The outspoken Ms. Behar has a few concerns aboutthe modern world. She is shocked at how expensive the East End has become, particularly the lobster salad. She worries about overbuilding and the destruction of wildlife habitats. She is perturbed by the political landscape in America.
“I’m totally obsessed with politics. I just watch CNN, MSNBC, all day long. I think that the country is in trouble.” She laughed. “It’s been a circus watching Donald Trump.” Ms. Behar, a liberal whose convictions often collided with Ms. Hasselbeck’s conservative beliefs on “The View,” attended a Hillary Clinton fund-raiser here on Saturday.
The comedian’s house is filled with furniture and decorative pieces picked up at estate and yard sales. Bargains don’t sway her so much, she said; it’s picking through people’s pasts and wondering about their lives that’s fun. Her latest find, which she happily showed off, is a wicker tray acquired for $20 this summer at an East Hampton Historical Society antiques show at Mulford Farm; it has pride of place on a glass coffee table.
She’s particularly fond of a recently purchased oil-on-wood painting from the 1930s that hangs in her mud room. Titled “Fat Lady,” it depicts an overweight burlesque dancer posing rather seductively onstage. Ms. Behar laughs every time she sees it.
“It’s so politically incorrect now,” she beamed.