Joy Behar and the other women at ABC’s The View found themselves in a major snag on Tuesday when discussing the results of the Miss America pageant. After the cast diminished the amount of “talent” present in Miss Colorado’s monologue about her experiences as a nurse for an Alzheimer’s patient, a #nursesunite hashtag campaign called for a boycott of The View .
Though several members of the panel, including Joy, were criticized over the segment. Michelle Collins led the debate on how unimpressive she felt Miss Colorado’s monologue was. As such, Michelle also bore the majority of the brunt when it came to defending it on Wednesday along with Behar and the rest of The View.
“I, for all of us, I want to say. Nurses, if you’re watching, we love you and respect you. You guys are wonderful, you’re the most compassionate people. And I think we just have to have a moment about that, but I was not talking about her as a nurse. We were talking about the talent competition, and it got misconstrued… By the way, if your bosses are watching, you all deserve raises. This is how much I love nurses. Give ’em more money. Give them my money.”
Though Joy may not have commented as heavily as Michelle, Behar actually had one of the most heavily mocked moments of the original segment on Tuesday. When discussing the attire that Miss Colorado had worn to the event, Joy asked, “Why is she wearing a doctor’s stethoscope?”
“Wow, the hosts of #TheView are so classy and intelligent, especially Joy Behar” -no one EVER #nursesunite pic.twitter.com/8PKja76ay3
— Courtney Avila (@courtney_avila) September 16, 2015
Behar herself blamed her own lack of comprehension for the stethoscope comment coming off disparaging. Joy’s defense also seemed to indicate that she had, perhaps, not seen the monologue in its entirety before she made her comments.
“Let me speak for myself. I was just not paying attention. I was looking at a Miss America tape, and there’s a women wearing an outfit with a stethoscope, and I’m thinking, ‘Is she in a costume?’ I didn’t know she was a nurse. I wasn’t trying to be funny. It was just stupid and inattentive on my part. I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”
While Behar and Collins seemed to yield to the negative backlash and grovel a little bit with the offended public, Raven Symone and Whoopi Goldberg seemed to hold more firmly in saying that the comments were taken out of context and should not have been taken as a slam against the nursing profession. You can watch the original video below to decide for yourself.
Joy Behar recently returned to The View after a two-year sabbatical.
[Image via Getty Images]
