Joy Behar

About

Josephine Victoria “Joy” Behar (; née Occhiuto; born October 7, 1942) is an American comedian, television host, actress, and playwright. She co-hosts the ABC talk show The View, on which she has appeared since the beginning of the series. For her work on The View, Behar won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2009. She hosted The Joy Behar Show on HLN from 2009 to 2011 and Joy Behar: Say Anything! on Current TV, from 2012 until the channel switched formats in August 2013. Behar’s latest weekly late-night talk show, Late Night Joy, aired on TLC in 2015. She also wrote The Great Gasbag: An A–Z Study Guide to Surviving Trump World.

Behar was born Josephine Victoria Occhiuto in 1942 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the only child of a Roman Catholic family of Italian descent, hailing from Sant’Eufemia d’Aspromonte, Calabria. Her mother, Rosa Diane “Rose” (née Carbone), was a seamstress, and her father, Louis Ferdinand “Gino” Occhiuto, was a truck driver for Coca-Cola. Behar earned a BA in sociology from Queens College in 1964 and an MA in English education from Stony Brook University in 1966. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, she taught English on Long Island at Lindenhurst Senior…