Joy Behar, currently a co-host of ABC’s Daytime Emmy Award-winning The View, is among today’s leading comic talents. Whether performing stand-up comedy or interviewing politicians and artists, she is a comedic original and a leading woman both on stage and screen. Armed with an MA in English Education from SUNY at Stony Brook, Joy originally began a career in teaching. She then set out to pursue comedy professionally and immediately received bookings from such famous New York clubs as Caroline’s and Catch a Rising Star. Joy went on to win three MAC awards and a CableACE Award.
On television, Joy starred in her own HBO special and was a regular on the series Baby Boom. Other appearances include the voice of a hilariously neurotic patient on Dr. Katz, which won the CableACE Award; The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; Live with Regis and Kelly; and The Late Show with David Letterman.
For three years, Joy hosted a popular call-in radio show on WABC, where she discussed politics with a deadly humorous bent. Her film appearances include Cookie with Peter Falk, This Is My Life directed by Nora Ephron, and Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery. In theatre, she had a successful run in the Off-Broadway hit The Food Chain, where she earned rave reviews in the starring role. She was also in the critically-acclaimed play The Vagina Monologues.
Joy is recipient of the Safe Horizon Champion Award, the Gracie Allen Tribute Award from the Foundation of American Women in Radio and Television, and the New York City Public Advocate’s Special Advocate Award for her outstanding friendship to the gay community. Joy is heavily involved with numerous philanthropic organizations and is a frequent contributor to several charitable foundations. More information is at https://abc.com/shows/the-view.
I was basically programmed as a child to entertain the family. No TV set, so I was it. They basically rewarded all of my performances. Every time they’d ask me to sing and dance and do a Shirley Temple number, or whatever else I was doing at the time, a whole bunch of Italian relatives would clap and encourage me to do more. In fact, the story is that they prevented me from going to bed sometimes: “Oh, do another song!”
I went through my teen years and I was humiliated by the whole idea of performance. It seemed like I was just a trained seal and I shut down on it until I was around thirty. By that time, I had had a baby and was married and I started to say, “Well, what else am I going to do? I’ve done that.” I went to college. I did everything I was supposed to do. I was a teacher, I lived in the suburbs, I did the whole thing and then I just took to my bed in a post-partum fog of, “What in the hell am I going to do now?”
I did not really throw myself into stand-up until I was a single parent who had been fired from Good Morning America and who had had a near-death experience. I had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured. That put me in another head altogether—the fact that I could’ve been dead. I figured, I almost died in real life, how bad could it be to die on stage? Everything is relative. That is what it took for me to get on stage and go for it. I needed that much. And once I decided to do it because I had nothing left to lose—me and Janis Joplin, defining freedom—I went for it. I started to be successful almost immediately. I was really emotionally prepared for it at that point and I had no choice. I just kept pushing.
I believe that this business is not something you choose. It kind of chooses you. They say sometimes you choose your parents, which is a crazy thing to say. I don’t really agree with that, but I do agree that the business chooses you in a way. It’s like I had no other choice. And if you speak to a lot of people who are as into it as I am, you’ll hear them say that they had other jobs, nothing worked, they couldn’t gel, they couldn’t stand their jobs, they hated the nine-to-five, they weren’t good at anything else, they went to Law School and hated it. You will hear that over and over again and I think that sometimes it’s a compulsion almost. And if there’s this compulsion, but you’re too scared to do it, you’re in turmoil. That’s Hell. You’ve either got to give it up or overcome it.
I’ve done everything that you could possibly do, at this point, in the industry. I’ve hit on every medium. I wrote a book, I did acting, I worked with Woody Allen in a movie, I’ve done television, I’ve done panelist—which I’m doing now—and, of course, stand-up comedy. I don’t sing and dance, that’s it. The most rewarding is the stand-up only because it’s my production. I get to make it up, produce it, direct it, control it. Nobody tells me what to do. In that way, it’s the most rewarding. But I also like the radio. I had a radio show for three years. I’m looking forward to another radio show at some point in the future.
What advice would you give to a performer starting out?
I think people should ask, “Is there anything else I can do that’s easier?” This is not an easy field. I don’t know at this point—after twenty some-odd years in the business—that I would do it if I knew the exact road it was going to take me down. It’s not easy to do! It looks like it’s more fun than it is, I think. It’s a lot of work! It’s a lot of work, a lot of stress, a lot of rejection, a lot of backslides.
It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes five to ten years to be a decent stand-up. One year, I was doing six sets on a Saturday night, in a row. I would go from the Improv to Catch a Rising Star to the Green Street Café to Folk City to the Five Oaks to the Duplex. I’d just bounce around the City. At some point, you don’t even remember: “Did I tell you that I was a teacher?” But that’s how you do it. You’ve got to do it over and over again. Still, one of the misconceptions about stand-up is that I’d have a great set—I’d kill—and I would think, “Okay, now I’ll have a career.” Wrong. You have to do it again and again and again. You have to see it like sex. It doesn’t have any diminishing returns.
What was your first paid gig?
I got seven hundred fifty dollars to do a doctor’s night. They were all doctors. Previous to that, I had done “safer” venues where I wasn’t getting paid, like gay cabarets. The gay audience is just so hip and so fun and they love to laugh and have a good time and they love a woman comedian. So I was always very comfortable there. If I got on at Catch a Rising Star or one of the comedy clubs, it was harder, but I wasn’t getting paid. I might have gotten cab fare. Then one day I got a call from a friend of mine who’s a doctor’s wife. She said, “They want to hire you to perform for this event.” You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, in the beginning, in terms of different kinds of jobs. It was seven hundred fifty dollars and my rent was only two-seventy so seven-fifty at that point was three months of rent, almost, just for doing what I’d been doing for free. But when you’re getting paid for it, you feel extra pressure. And doctors are not really the best audience. They’re only interested in hearing about themselves. So after I finished schmoozing with them about them and I started to talk about me, I lost them. It was the first time that I had brought my now “practically husband” (I’ve been with him for twenty-three years). He said, “You were funny. They were bad.” I figured, “I’ll never let go of this guy!”
What do you wish someone had told you at the beginning of your career?
Nobody told me shit. I guess it would be this: You can either make the audience laugh or you can scare them. If you are scared, they will be scared. So you have to project confidence and that’s the one thing you don’t have in the beginning. You fake it. You bite the bullet and you just do it again. My very first set that I ever did was a character I did at the Improv. It was killer. I was vomiting beforehand. It killed. And it was in front of a full house at ten o’clock at night at the Improv. It really did well. You can imagine how shocking that is to somebody, the first time they’re up on stage like that. It scared me so much it took me about six more months to get up there again. The next time I got up, I didn’t get the ten o’clock spot. I got the 2am spot: two drunks. I died like a dog. Same material. I thought it was me. No one said to me, “Listen, Joy, it’s because of the time. It’s because of the audience. It has to do with the room. Of course you’re going to die!” And then you get scared because you’re not getting the laughs. It snowballs into recklessness.
You should know that, in the beginning. It takes a while. There’s the emotional part, there’s the work, there’s the ego part, the confidence, all of it. And that takes time. I suggest that everybody has a therapist when they’re in this industry—or in any industry—because people get in the business and when they’re not hot, they’re not invited to the parties anymore. You can’t pay attention to fame. You can’t. It will be gone the next week and then what have you got?
What is your favorite thing about being a performer?
I like the work. I like the idea that I have a creative thing that I do, that’s mine, that I can do it until I fall into the grave. I like that I can make people laugh. This may sound schmaltzy but when I was on the radio, I got letters from people saying, “I was literally suicidal. I was about to slit my wrists and then I heard you on the radio.” It’s stuff like that. And you can feel it sometimes with your audience. They’re so happy to hear someone speak the truth and make it funny and elevate their existence a little bit with humor. It’s a great thing. That’s the altruistic part of me. The other part of me is, “I’m getting a laugh! I dig it!” I mean, I’m not a social worker. It’s like a latent function of your own narcissism in a way, your own ego, to release people’s endorphins.
What is your least favorite thing about being a performer?
I’m not crazy about flying around. I don’t like that part too much. I’m trying to think: What don’t I like about the business? I’m always complaining, you’d think I’d come up with something! I complain on a regular basis about little things that go wrong within the course of the day: “This didn’t work.” “That one irritated me.” “Well, if she thinks I’m going there, she’s wrong.” But the overall level of satisfaction is very high. I like the control that I have. I can control my career to a large extent. But I’m not greedy. If you’re greedy, you lose control. You always have to maintain control over yourself because it will wipe you away like a tsunami if you don’t. Don’t be too mercenary and make decisions only based on money. That’s a big mistake. Then you get used to living too high and then you can’t pull it back when the next job doesn’t come in.
How did you get hired to be a panelist on The View?
I was asked to do an event for Milton Berle. I said, “I grew up with Miltie. Sure, I’ll do it.” I went to the Waldorf Astoria and we had a dinner. Everybody was there: Barbara Walters was there, Regis Philbin was there, Milton was there with his then-considered young wife. He was eighty-nine, she was fifty, so she was considered jailbait to him. So, I got up and I said to Steve, my boyfriend, “This is going to be brutal. I don’t know who these people are.” I got up and I did a story about old guys with young women. It’s nice, as a comedian, to have an arsenal of material because I could look at the group and say, “Here’s Miltie, who’s old, with a young wife, relatively. Let’s go for that. It’s relevant.” Of course, he’s a comic, so he loves it! I did really, really well.
I got off stage and Steve said to me, “Everybody was laughing, but Barbara Walters was not laughing.” I said, “Listen, when am I going to work with Barbara Walters? She’s a newswoman. Who cares?” The next day I ran into Regis Philbin, who I knew. He said to me, “You were really funny last night. And Barbara Walters said to me, ‘Who is that woman?'” A few months later, I got the call that she was interested in me for the show. So, you show up to do your thing and you never know what’s going to happen.
How do you choose the material you work on?
I write it! There’s a Chinese saying about the longest journey starting with one step. The same thing with stand-up material: The longest set starts with one joke. And then you have two jokes and then three and then four and then five. You start with like five minutes because open mics, wherever they have them, that’s all they want you up there for. I would recommend that people do five minutes of jokes that are related in some way. Then you have what comedians call a “hunk” of material. Then you add another hunk and another hunk. And then it just keeps building.
I would be in a conversation and I would be funny in the conversation or at a party and, once I made a conscious decision to do this for a living, I started to notice when people would laugh at something I said and then I would write it down. I even try to do that now. I’m always taking notes. You never know where you’re going to come out with it. Write it down and keep your notes, even if they’re all over the house—we’re not the most organized group! You keep them and then when the pressure is on and the gun is to your head, you pull them all together. I’ll even write something on stage, as I’m going. I’m a big proponent of adding to what I already have. I think Phyllis Diller said this: “The act is an hour and it becomes a piece of living sculpture. You put in, you take out, you add, subtract, all the time.” It keeps taking a different form as you keep doing it. Then you can go off the act, if you want, which I do all the time.
When you don’t have a lot of material and they want you to do a half-hour and you only have fifteen minutes, you learn to work the crowd. You schmooze toward the material you do have. Let’s say you have some jokes on marriage. Now you talk to people in the audience: “You married?” “Yes.” “How long you married?” And then they’ll say something stupid to you and you’ll get a laugh off of them! You keep delving and delving and you have a little relationship with the people you’re talking with—you remember their names—knowing, that in a couple of minutes, you’re going to hit them with a good line and you’ve sucked up time there.
Was your family supportive?
Of course. If you don’t have support, it’s a very lonely road. You need somebody in your life who’s going to not only be supportive but also will tell you the truth—someone who cares enough about you to tell you the truth. My husband—I was married before—he also was very supportive. I don’t pick rejecting men. I don’t need that at home! People get paid to do that. Some people, I’ve observed, thrive on the rejection because they’ve had a rejecting family. Now they’re in the business and the rejection doesn’t mean anything to them.
How do you handle rejection?
Shrink therapy. I’ve been in therapy for a long time. I also handle it by doing stand-up. Anyone who wants to do stand-up needs to know one thing: Everyone who’s funny at a party thinks that they can do it. It’s the double-edged sword of the industry because it is the hardest thing to do and yet it is the thing that gives you your oxygen. The same can be said for both acting and stand-up, really. I find even now—when I’m on The View and I get frustrated with the job and I feel straight-jacketed because I’m on television and I can’t say everything I want—that when I get on stage and just let it go, I feel ten times better practically for the whole week. At the same time, I’m always reluctant to get on stage because it is so hard to do. It’s a paradox. The thing with stand-up is, you’re dealing with immediate rejection and immediate acceptance. You get hooked on it. It’s very, very addictive, that laughing. Most comedians will tell you they were hooked on that when they were young. It’s like drugs.
How did you get your first manager?
Catch a Rising Star was a club that I finally got into—you had to really bust your ass to get in there, at the time—and the guy who ran the club became my manager. He would see me perform all the time. And once the guy who runs the club is your manager, you get better spots. They would have showcases and the agents would come in. Showcasing is the best way to get an agent when you’re a stand-up. You get on stage and people patrol the clubs and then they’ll see you.
Actors think that they can be comedians first because they’ll be seen that way. They sometimes do get picked up and become sitcom actors but they were never comedians in the first place, in my opinion. Any way you can be seen is fine. If you’re funny, good. But you’re not going to have a career as a stand-up comedian if you only do it for five minutes and get picked up for a sitcom.
What made you choose New York?
New York is easy. I’m five minutes from where I work. I don’t like LA. I can’t take that schlepping around constantly. I lived in LA for six months while I was in a TV series called Baby Boom with Kate Jackson. I lived in West Hollywood at the bottom of Laurel Canyon in what looked like an old-age home to me. People walked around with walkers! It’s not my cup of tea. I’m a ghetto girl. I’m a definite type for a sitcom. I always was. But I wasn’t interested in living in LA. I’ve always managed to have a career that’s not as big maybe as it could’ve been because I insisted on staying in New York.
How did your stand-up comedy lead to series work?
I didn’t really ever pursue acting. I think they may have seen me doing stand-up. That was a time when a lot of stand-up comedians were being picked up by sitcoms. There was a run on that for a while. They were getting development deals. There was a guy who was working for Warner Bros. who saw me in some kind of a TV thing and he got me a development deal with Warner Bros. It’s really haphazard in certain ways. People see you. In the beginning, it’s just: Get them to see you. But you don’t want them to see you before you’re really ready. If you’re seen immediately, you don’t have time to develop. You need to be bad and you need to survive that. There’s good news and bad news to being seen immediately. You need to be emotionally ready for success. It’s better to be successful when you’re older, but the business is very ageist. I think that a lot of meltdowns that go on are because people are not ready to be successful. They have no idea what it means to be successful. They have a fantasy that that’s going to make them happy. Success doesn’t make you happy; it just makes you successful.
This interview was conducted on February 2, 2005, and it originally appeared in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors by Bonnie Gillespie and Blake Robbins, available at Amazon.