In the swirl of 'The View,' a stabilizing force

Joy Behar (center, with fellow panelist Whoopi Goldberg) gets prepped to go before the cameras on "The View." (Joe tabacca for the boston globe)

NEW YORK - On the day Barack Obama came in to gab with the ladies of "The View," Joy Behar was sick. Some-nasty-virus, in-need-of-chicken-soup sick, so sick that she skipped the 11 a.m. live show to stay in bed. But for the Obama episode, taped that afternoon to air the following day, she dragged herself into the ABC studios, arriving backstage with a wan smile.

"Barack cannot go on without me," she declared, before heading to hair and makeup.

Eh, Obama might have made it. (With the women, he can charm. And the audience was adoring.) But that's not to say that Behar wasn't needed - just that her biggest contribution came before Obama arrived on the set.

During "Hot Topics," the show's discussion of current events, token conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck read a quote from Obama's former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The ancient Romans, Wright had said, "looked down their garlic noses" at Jesus Christ. Hasselbeck was outraged. Cohost Whoopi Goldberg rushed to Obama's defense. Hasselbeck started to quiver. And just as things were getting uncomfortable, Behar stepped in, filling several roles at once: The resident Italian, the committed liberal, the comedian.

"The Italian nose has been celebrated in art and culture," she declared. "And if I didn't have a lot of garlic in my diet, I wouldn't have this wonderful complexion." The crowd howled with laughter, the tension passed, and Behar wore a triumphant smile on her face. Her work was done.

It was a signature example of Behar's role on the 11-year-old talk show, says Bill Geddie, the executive producer. "She's that person in the room that doesn't let things get too sensitive," he said backstage that day. "She's the one who says, 'Oh, come on.' "

From the standpoint of the public, that's an unsung sort of job. Behar, 65, who will perform her stand-up routine Saturday night at the Berklee Performance Center, is by far the unflashiest member of the panel: the least likely to tantalize with her wardrobe, generate a tabloid headline, or launch into one of the show's now-famous catfights. That may well explain why Behar - along with Barbara Walters, executive producer and general doyenne - has been the show's longest-running panelist. She lasted through the saga of Star Jones, whose popularity shrank as dramatically as her waistline. She survived the yearlong tabloid feast that was Rosie O'Donnell's stint.

"Things swirl around me and I just keep going," Behar says, sounding content to be the official defuser.

That's why her stand-up act is a bit of a revelation. This is a more acidic version of Behar, a Bloody Mary with an extra shot of vinegar. Off-Broadway, at the Zipper Factory Theater, where she tests material at a charity show called "Bitchin' With Behar," she's a little more political than her "View" self, and a lot more profane. Her cohosts might be safe on the air, but not here. Of the increasingly-divaish Jones, she says, "One time she coughed up a hairball and there was a label on it." She'll even curse at audience members if they interrupt too much: "I love you, but shut the [expletive] up."

And while Behar was polite, if skeptical, last week with John McCain on "The View," onstage she's as angry a liberal as O'Donnell ever seemed. Her routine includes a few sarcastic torch songs, such as a bitter rendition of "Thanks for the Memories," aimed at George W. Bush. (There's also a musical meditation on anti-Semitism called "Blame It on the Jews," and sung to the tune of "Ain't We Got Fun": Gonnorhea/ North Korea/ Blame it on the Jews!)

Is it a relief, she's asked after a recent show, to let it all out? "Oh, yeah," she says. "Oh, yeah. Oh, and I was holding back."

That's the difference, perhaps, between going it alone onstage and holding down a role on a TV panel. Defusing comes naturally on "The View" because it has always been part of Behar's shtick. "That was my position in the family, I think," she says of growing up an only child in Brooklyn. "If things got tense around me, I'd make a joke."

But while she was always a cutup, a comedy career didn't seem an option in the '60s and '70s. "The personal part is that I was petrified," she says. "The sociological part is that it was not encouraged."

Instead, she got married and became a teacher, following her husband to Providence, then Long Island. Eventually, she took a job as a receptionist at "Good Morning America." Over the course of several years, her marriage ended, she faced a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, and she got fired. She was not, she concedes, a very good receptionist.

But her setbacks left her with few reasons not to test out her stand-up dream. "I was divorced, I was a single mother, I had no job, I had very little money, and I had no choice," she says. "And so I put aside my ego, my fears, my trepidations, my lack of confidence . . . and I went out and just did it."

Before long, she was getting attention and winning awards. Within six months of leaving "Good Morning America" she was back on the show as a guest. She won a variety talk show on Lifetime, then a part in a sitcom, then an HBO special, then a New York radio talk show.

One night in the early '90s, she appeared at the Waldorf-Astoria at an 89th birthday party for Milton Berle. Walters was in the audience, and happened to be in the midst of casting for a new daytime show that would feature a panel of women. She had never heard of Behar, Walters now recalls, but one of the jokes she heard stuck: something about how Salman Rushdie had been in hiding for years, but still managed to get married twice.

Brought in for "View" tryouts, Behar sailed through. "She was not only funny, but she also had intelligence," Walters says. And Geddie said he thought that in Behar many viewers would see their own sarcastic aunts. It even helped that her Italian-Catholic persona was easily mistakable for another tribe. Longstanding Behar joke: "A couple of years ago, I got a call: 'Happy Hanukkah.' And I said, 'Ma, I'm not Jewish!' "

Still, Behar's original role on "The View" was limited to filling in on days that Walters was absent. Geddie says he quickly realized that with Behar on board, the show's pace was quicker. Dead-end conversations ended sooner.

"I went to Barbara and said, 'She needs to be here every day. It just lightens things up tremendously,' " Geddie says. And it's a tribute to Behar's value, he says, that while once she was the token comedian, now the show has three: Behar, Goldberg, and Sherri Shepherd.

Perhaps there's another advantage to three comedians on "The View": Everything seems a little lighter these days. Last year's fights between O'Donnell and Hasselbeck, who squared off on politics with six times the vitriol of "Hannity and Colmes," were great fodder for YouTube, but they might not have cheered the show's target demographic. During one especially vehement shoutfest, even Behar stood up and pretended to walk off the set. She sensed, she says now, that the audience was getting uncomfortable, too.

Behar says she doesn't regret the Rosie days: "She came in and gave us a jolt and we needed it. I always thank her for that." But she says the current panelists actually like one another. And from a seat in the studio audience, that seems eminently possible. Hasselbeck and Shepherd argue over Obama on the air, but when the cameras are off, they rubbed arms like teenage girlfriends. And both Behar and Hasselbeck say they're personal friends, despite opposing political views. Before the Obama show, Behar says, Hasselbeck sent her an e-mail: "You'd better rest up for your beau Barack." (She had a point. Behar did, it turned out, frame the photo an ABC photographer took of her beside the candidate.)

All of this must serve to make a show like "The View" more hospitable to politicians, at a time when more and more politicians are eager to show up on daytime TV. How better to reach the female masses who aren't glued to cable news? Besides, compared to the daily skepticism that they get from the political press, daytime TV can be a breeze. When Obama appeared on "Ellen," he made waves by getting jiggy to a James Brown tune.

"The View" is still infused with that Barbara Walters spirit: it's fluff, but with an undercurrent of actual journalism. Obama had to submit to a grilling - largely from Hasselbeck and Walters - about Jeremiah Wright. Behar questioned him pointedly about whether he could withstand Republican attacks. Still, the moment ABC promoted the most came when Behar asked Obama if he was related to Brad Pitt. Yes, Obama said: "I guess we're ninth cousins, something, removed - or something. I think he got the better-looking side of the gene pool."

Even Walters, who guards her objectivity with care, had to loosen up for a moment. "We were saying just before you came out - maybe we shouldn't say this," she said. "But we thought you were very sexy looking."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net.