-By Warner Todd Huston
Joy Behar, one of the original couch members of ABC’s late morning gabfest, The View, has confirmed that she is leaving the long-running show.
Billed as a comedienne when she first hit The View’s couch 16 and 1/2 years ago, Behar livened the show with her progressive perspective and sharp tongue.
Aside from Barbra Walters, the show’s originator, Behar is the show’s last remaining original cast member.
Behar will finish out this season before she moves of to “other things” that she has wanted to do.
“You reach a point when you say to yourself, ‘Do I want to keep doing this?’ There are other things on my plate I want to do–I’ve been writing a play, I’ve been neglecting my standup,” Behar said Thursday in an interview posted at Deadline.com.
Behar is also soon to end her TV talk show on Current TV once Al Jazeera takes over management of the cable network.
There is speculation that Behar could wind up at CNN.
Behar has been no stranger to outrageous statements over the years. To name just a few of her more recent controversial statements, during the late presidential election, she announced that it would be “cool” if Mitt Romney’s house would burn to the ground. Last November she compared religion to drug addiction, and before he sold out to oil billionaires, Behar thought Al Gore’s Current TV network was as wonderful as a woman’s “G-Spot.”
In 2011 the talk show hostess also displayed her knowledge of American history by claiming that the Republican Party has never been “black friendly,” seeming to forget that it was the Republican Party that freed the slaves.
In a statement, ABC said, “Joy Behar has been instrumental in the success of The View from the very beginning. We wish her all the best in this next chapter, and are thrilled that we have her for the remainder of the season.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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