The View’s Joy Behar left her co-hosts visibly unsettled when she made a risqué joke about her, uh, private parts while digging at the network that aired Wednesday night’s GOP primary debate—prompting Whoopi Goldberg to comically bite her knuckles to prevent herself from reacting.
At the top of Thursday’s broadcast of the daytime ABC talk show, the panel weighed in on the NewsNation-hosted event, which featured “anti-woke” candidate Vivek Ramaswamy picking fights with the other candidates while peddling fringe-right conspiracy theories. Throughout the segment, Behar quipped about how the debate was so outrageous she didn’t even need to get high to watch it.
“Interesting that I watched the whole thing and I was not even stoned. It was so entertaining as usual,” the liberal comedian snarked. “You know, sometimes you take a gummy to sleep, you know? And it’s a hilarious event at that point.”
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While this line drew some uncomfortable chuckles from the table and executive producer Brian Teta, the hosts would later be thrown for a loop by another Joy joke.
“I would love to know the stats as to how many people watched that NewsNation [debate] because it was on NewsNation and The CW,” co-host Sunny Hostin said.
“I couldn’t find it,” colleague Sara Haines replied. “Exactly,” Hostin added, prompting Behar to giddily chime in: “It’s like my G-spot!”
Haines immediately burst out into laughter, quipping: “Harder to find, Joy!”
While Hostin attempted to read a legal disclaimer about former President Donald Trump, the rest of the table struggled to maintain composure. Conservative co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin tried to stifle her chuckles while the live studio audience giggled over Hostin.
“Why are you all laughing already?” she wondered.
After a few seconds of awkward silence, Goldberg stared into the camera and bit down on her right hand, drawing more laughter from the crowd. She then turned to Teta, who was off-stage, and asked: “Just move on?”
After getting a nod from the boss, Goldberg dramatically clenched her teeth and threw it to commercial break. “We’ll be right back,” she said.
NewsNation, the upstart channel that was the butt of Behar’s joke, is tougher to find than its cable-news rivals, mostly owing to its conversion from an entertainment channel, WGN America. The network announced ahead of the debate that it could be live-streamed from its website, available to those who couldn’t find NewsNation on their cable provider.
The debate itself drew 1.6 million viewers, with an additional 2.5 million on The CW Network, which is owned by NewsNation’s corporate parent Nexstar. While the combined audience on Wednesday night was the lowest of this year’s GOP debate cycle—and even fell behind Fox News’ made-for-TV Blue State vs. Red State event last week—it still set ratings records for the two-year-old cable channel, drawing the largest audience in NewsNation’s history.
While the network still pales in comparison to its more established cable news competitors, its viewership has increased massively this year, gaining 73 percent in primetime total viewership and 90 percent among the key advertising demographic of adults aged 25-54.
