Joy Behar

Joy Behar, born Josephine Victoria Occhiuto on October 7, 1942, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is an American comedian, actress, television host, and playwright. The only child of a Roman Catholic family of Italian descent with roots in Sant'Eufemia d'Aspromonte, Calabria, she was raised by her mother Rosa, a seamstress, and her father Louis Ferdinand Occhiuto, 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, after which she taught English at Lindenhurst Senior High School on Long Island through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. She later trained as an actor at the HB Studio.

Behar entered the entertainment industry in the early 1980s, beginning as a receptionist and later a producer on Good Morning America before transitioning to stand-up comedy. She made television appearances on ABC's Good Morning America and The New Show, a short-lived NBC project produced by Lorne Michaels. In 1987, she hosted a variety talk show on Lifetime Television called Way Off Broadway, which featured Larry David as both a writer and performer. Additional early credits included hosting Live from Queens, recurring on NBC's Baby Boom, and appearing in HBO comedy specials One Night Stand and Women of the Night 2. She also hosted a talk show on 77 WABC radio in New York City in the early 1990s and took minor roles in the films Cookie, This Is My Life, and Manhattan Murder Mystery.

Her Broadway career spanned from 1994 to 2008. During that period she starred in Comedy Tonight and also appeared in The Yellow Brick Road Not Taken. Beyond Broadway, Behar performed in theatrical productions including The Food Chain, The Vagina Monologues, and Love, Loss and What I Wore, and she performed in an Off-Broadway one-woman show titled Me, My Mouth and I. Her debut play, My First Ex-Husband, premiered Off-Broadway in New York City in 2025.

In 1997, Behar became one of the original panelists on the ABC daytime talk show The View, co-created by Barbara Walters. She initially appeared only on days when Walters was absent before becoming a permanent co-host. In August 2009, Behar and her co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sherri Shepherd, and Walters won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. She departed the program on August 9, 2013, and returned as a regular co-host at the start of the show's 19th season on September 8, 2015.

Beginning in 2007, Behar occasionally filled in as guest host on Larry King Live. On June 11, 2009, she announced she would host The Joy Behar Show on HLN, which launched in the fall of 2009 and ran concurrently with her work on The View until its final broadcast on December 15, 2011. She subsequently hosted Joy Behar: Say Anything! on Current TV, premiering September 4, 2012, until the channel was sold to Al Jazeera in August 2013. Her weekly late-night talk show Late Night Joy premiered on TLC on November 4, 2015, and was cancelled after five episodes.

Among her other screen credits, Behar portrayed Dr. Lucy in the 2011 comedy film Hall Pass and recurred in Woody Allen's Amazon series Crisis in Six Scenes. She appeared on the eighth season of Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown, finishing in fourth place. Behar has also authored multiple books, including the essay collection Joy Shtick: Or What Is the Existential Vacuum and Does It Come with Attachments?, the children's book Sheetzucacapoopoo: My Kind of Dog published in 2006, and The Great Gasbag: An A–Z Study Guide to Surviving Trump World published in 2017.

In her personal life, Behar married college professor Joe Behar in 1965; they divorced in 1981 and have one daughter, Eve Behar Scotti, and a grandson named Luca. Behar began dating Steve Janowitz in 1982 and married him in 2011. She maintains residences in the Hamptons and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.