Joy Behar Reflects on Being Briefly 'Forced' Off 'The View'

Joy Behar is looking back on her time away from The View, which she reminds was not a decision of her own making.

The 80-year-old co-host has been a part of the ABC talk show since its initial launch in 1997, which would make her tenure 26 years long if it wasn't for an involuntary break from the show between 2013 and 2015.

During the Thursday, May 25 episode of The View, Behar made a not-so-subtle quip about her firing back in 2013, calling it a "small hiatus," to put it nicely.

Behar and the other co-hosts were in the middle of a discussion on Thursday about the recent passing of late music icon Tina Turner when Behar stated, per Us Weekly, "There's something about her."

"I've been on this show for 26 years, right, with a small hiatus as we all know—forced," she jabbed, eliciting a laugh from the audience, as well as some of her fellow co-hosts.

"For some reason, this death has gotten me in my kishkas," she continued of Turner's passing. "I don’t know what it is, something about her that she just got to me, I could start crying right now."

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For those who need a refresher, Behar was notably fired from The View back in 2013, a choice she has repeatedly insisted was not her own.

"Somebody wanted me gone," she previously told PEOPLE back in 2017. "It was not 100 percent my choice."

At the time, Behar said she still hadn't been given a straight answer about the reason for her firing, though she suspected it had to do with politics and her progressive beliefs.

“The way I heard it, and I don’t know what’s true because you never know, they got rid of a Republican so they wanted to get rid of a Democrat,” she said. “That’s not the first time I’ve been fired for my politics. So I wasn’t shocked at that analysis."

But her stint away from The View roundtable didn't last long, as she was later asked back on the show in 2015, and has remained one of the show's most dominant fixtures ever since.

Next: Whoopi Goldberg Slips Up and Disses 'American Idol' on 'The View'