Oprah, The View, The Thinly Veiled Hostility

Oprah hosted Barbara Walters of the View and her minions, Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Friday, February 11. There seemed to be just a bit of thinly veiled hostility going on and some sheer stupidity as well.

The absolutely No. One Weirdest Remark was made by Oprah herself when Barbara Walters mentioned that they stopped her heart for 30 minutes during her surgery. Oprah asked Barbara if she saw Jesus! You’ve got to hand it to Babs for being gracious. She simply replied that she didn’t see Jesus when she could have said, “if I did, I would have converted to Christianity,” and embarrassed the bejesus out of the big O.

Later on, most ungraciously, Oprah unnecessarily called Joy Behar out for using the word “nappy” in relation to her own hair — (Joy’s hair, not Oprah’s).

“Ooh, you said the ‘n’ word,” Oprah said, taking Joy a little off guard. What reason did she have to say that particularly when Sherri had just said during the clip shown of a young Joy with “nappy” hair that Joy looked like a black girl.

Joy said the look was deliberate, she was going somewhere as “an African Queen.” Oprah said: “Oh, okay, because you looked African there.”

“Well,” Joy said, ” I have the hair. I’m very nappy …,” while Sherri added that Joy’s hair is “very curly.”

This is where Oprah popped out with that “oooh, you used the ‘n’ word — nappy.”

“You’re not allowed to use that word?,” a surprised Joy Behar responded.

Oprah played it off: “nappy, oh no, I like it.” They then had a senseless “nappy’s good” exchange. If it’s good and Oprah likes it, then why did she say “ooh” in the first place and call it the ‘n’ word? WTF?

Sherri Shepherd then said that before Joy comes in and “gets a Keratin treatment, it’s like really tight Jheri curls. Real tight, tight like an Afro.” Oprah said something about talking about Keratin treatments, “but not here,” Sherri began to reply but was cut off by Oprah and then Joy said something about “formaldehyde.”

“Don’t go there, Joy,” Oprah warned. Well, we can see not having time to go off on this particular tangent, but the way Oprah said “don’t go there,” didn’t really match up with a “we don’t have time to talk about it” thing.

Oprah has an article about the dangers of using Brazilian Keratin hair treatments on her own site as well as a thread where people have even said their hair fell out after using it.

Oprah asked all the women to say one word to describe each other. Nobody else had any problem with their assigned person, but the best the normally glib and humorous Joy could squeeze out about Elisabeth was “talkative.”

Then, of course, there was Barbara Walter’s gaffe in saying “President Mubarak” when she meant Obama. But compared to the above mentioned incidents, that was nothing. In fact, it was perfectly understandable with all eyes on Egypt for the past few weeks. And actually, Barbara Walters was probably pissed as all hell that she was on Oprah when Mubarak resigned.