Joy Behar landed in hot water when a joke about a decades-old scandal fell flat.
“The View” host took a comedic jab at former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger during the April 29 episode, saying if you date a man with his physique, “he’s going to leave you for the housekeeper anyway.”
The quip was met with almost immediate boos from the audience, to which Behar’s “View” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin responded: “Too soon! It’s only been 30 years!”
Behar’s comments came in response to a segment that saw the co-hosts discussing their ideal physique for a male partner. Shrugging off the idea of a chiseled, six-pack clad mate, Behar said: “You have to be perfect if they’re perfect. I prefer a man who’s not perfect. I’m not perfect.”
“I like them to be legally blind even. That helps,” she joked, adding, “I mean, if you get a guy like Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s going to leave you for the housekeeper anyway.”
Schwarzenegger famously had an affair in the mid-1990s with his then-housekeeper, Mildred Baena, which resulted in a child and the end of his marriage to Maria Shriver.
Joseph Baena, Schwarzenegger and Baena’s son, went on to compete on “Dancing with the Stars” in 2005.
In her recent book, “I Am Maria,” Shriver chronicled the emotional end to her marriage and how she moved toward healing.
“As I sat on the hotel room floor in the dark, terrified and alone with tears streaming down my face, I thought to myself: Maria, this doesn’t have to be the end of the you. It can’t be the end of you. Make it a new beginning of you,” she wrote.
In an hourlong conversation on “The Oprah Podcast,” following the book’s release, Shriver also told Oprah Winfrey that recounting it was still “an emotional thing for me.”
“I wanted to know how that had happened to me. I wanted to know who I could be moving forward,” she told Winfrey, “I think Arnold and I have a great relationship now, and I think there will always be a love there.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘The View’: Joy Behar booed over Arnold Schwarzenegger affair joke
