Entertainment

Great new Joy

THE hardest-working woman in show busi ness took on a night job last evening and, instead of falling asleep like most people who go to work at 9 p.m., instead woke up the sleepy HLN, formerly known as Headline News, or CNN Lite.

And more important, what Joy Behar, heir apparent to Larry King, did last night was present the smartest new talk show of the TV season, a show that could turn out to be the smartest news show on television, period.

The difference between “The Joy Behar Show” and every other program on CNN right now is that she combined informed guests who debated the news of the day — OK, she got very lucky because it was a banner news day — with entertainment, and even had as her first showbiz guest Bette Midler, who has, through the miracle of high-speed plastic surgery, turned into Helen Hunt.

The most telling thing that lefty Behar did was finally to figure out what TV and radio right-wingers have known for years: If you’re in an entertainment medium, you better be entertaining.

Until last night, lefty talkers have been short on laughs and long on lectures. Listening to, say, Air America is like being married to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speechwriter with no possibility of divorce.

Among Behar’s guests were left-wing comic Janeane Garofalo, who sat with conservative political consultant Bay Buchanan to duke it out about Sarah Palin’s new 400-page tome, and then debate if the Obama mystique is all smoke and mirrors.

Judge Jeanine Pirro and Roger Friedman talked Roman Polanski, Jack Cafferty complained about the Obama Traveling Air Show heading to Grimm’s Fairy Tale Land to beg the Olympic crooks to consider Chicago, and editor Janice Min picked apart “Jon & Kate” minus one.

And speaking of people with bad hair, if there’s one thing wrong with Joy’s great new show it’s her old-lady Aunt Carmela hairdo. Please Joy, call me — I’ll pay for you to go to my hairdressers.

In the end, an hour well spent in a news slot that hasn’t been this much fun in, well, forever.