‘The View’: It’s Time for Joy Behar to Ditch the Stale Trump Jokes

For the last 20 years, Joy Behar has brought some much-needed levity to The View. Originally hired to fill in on Barbara Walters’ days off, Behar was quickly promoted to full-time co-host, and she’s evolved along with the ABC daytime show as it’s transitioned from politically-minded to entertainment-focused to back again. Over the past few seasons, the longtime host has come into her own as The View‘s most vocal Trump critic, but now, almost three years into his administration, her schtick is starting to get old. If Behar wants to continue to grow with the show, it’s time to get some new material.

Behar’s return to The View in fall 2015 (she hosted from 1997 to 2013 and then took a two-year hiatus) couldn’t have come at a better time: the presidential election was in full swing, and over the course of Season 19, Donald Trump emerged as a surprise Republican frontrunner. Behar was critical of Trump from the beginning — his attacks on Rosie O’Donnell in the mid-2000s certainly didn’t help — and her feelings only intensified after he was elected. “As usual, men can get away with anything and women can get away with nothing,” she said the day after the election (talk about a time capsule of View history). Of course, her biting criticism came with no shortage of jokes. “Was he medicated?” she asked later that morning, during a discussion about Trump’s seemingly “calm” acceptance speech.

It’s a familiar refrain for fans of The View. Behar frequently jokes about the president’s “mental illness” — “Trump needs to be medicated and hospitalized,” she said last year — his habit of using non-words like “bigly,” his financial issues, his hair… you get it. In 2017, the longtime host even turned her many insults into a book, The Great Gasbag: An A-to-Z Study Guide to Surviving the Trump World. A sample line: “B is for Bankruptcy. Or, as Trump thinks of it, business as usual.”

But unfortunately, almost three years after Trump was elected, Behar is still making the same jokes — and the humor has worn off. “The only thing that’s missing is the picture of a bald eagle with a combover,” she said on July 26, while discussing the altered presidential seal that appeared behind Trump at a teen summit. “He’s touchy and paranoid. He’s like Typhoid Mary: everything he touches turns to dust,” she said on April 24 (this one doesn’t even really make sense!). “You can talk about us and John McCain until you’re blue in the face. It’s not going to change the fact that he was a hero,” said moderator Whoopi Goldberg on March 20, during a discussion about Trump’s renewed attacks on the late Sen. John McCain. “‘Til you’re orange in the face,” replied Behar with a smile. “Orange.”

Behar’s commitment to dissing Trump isn’t the only thing that has remained constant over the last few years: The View co-host also regularly draws laughs with TMI reflections on her sex life. Whether she’s talking about her sex routine — “Totally empty stomach, martini in the afternoon, at a hotel,” she said in March — or her forthcoming S&M project about a male “submissive,” these off-the-cuff admissions are often funnier than her canned Trump zingers. Would you rather watch Joy Behar joke about post-menopausal sex (and then watch the entire panel react in horror), or listen to her crack the same lines about Trump’s fake tan as every other comedian on TV?

If Behar can bring this same improvised energy to her Trump routine — if she can freshen up her material and make her punchlines feel spontaneous again — great. If not, it may be time to lay off the president. While Trump is absolutely deserving of Behar’s criticism, it doesn’t amount to much when she’s simply recycling old jokes; at some point, Behar risks veering into “gasbag” territory of her own.

No matter what Behar decides, she needs to start thinking about a world post-Trump (the same could be said for The View itself, but that’s a discussion for another time). How will she make her mark when she’s not taking shots at the president? What will she and Meghan McCain argue about when Trump is out of office? Who knows when that will be, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter: the “Combover-in-Chief” jokes are stale now, and they’ll certainly be stale then.

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