“The View’s” Joy Behar, no fan of President Trump, claimed that he is jealous of former President Barack Obama and offered a rosy picture of Obama’s presidency. Behar made the comments on the show’s “Behind the Table” podcast after addressing comedy filmmaker Judd Apatow’s remarks that comedy during President Trump’s tenure is hard to make given that the administration is “so cruel.” “If you look at what’s happening in the world, it’s stranger than Dr Strangelove. Characters in our country are more ridiculous than characters in Kubrick’s film, so what can comedy do? The Trump administration is hard to be exaggerated in a sketch, so it’s a difficult moment for political comedy,” he told The London Times while promoting his Mel Brooks documentary, “The 99 Year Old Man.” “It’s very difficult and so cruel that there’s not a lot of humor in it. Indeed, sometimes I think things have become so serious that, maybe, it’s a moment for us not to joke about it and to instead have a bit more energy to fight for our values,” he added.

Behar agreed. “When Obama came in, it was nice. There was nothing to make fun of,” insisted Behar. “It was… things were going well for eight years. We didn’t have to… we could talk about our husbands again. We could talk about our mothers-in-law. And now it’s serious again, but it’s too serious now.” Behar has often compared the two presidencies, insisting in July that  President Trump is jealous of President Obama. “The thing about [President Trump] is he’s so jealous of Obama, because Obama is everything that he is not: Trim, smart, handsome, happily married, and can sing Al Green’s song ‘Let’s Stay Together’ better than Al Green. And Trump cannot stand it,” she stated. The White House pushed back, with White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers calling Behar an “irrelevant loser.” “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” said Rogers. “It’s no surprise that The View’s ratings hit an all-time low last year.”

The lack of comedic material during President Obama’s time in office has not gone unnoticed. While comedians Key and Peele are best-known for mocking the former President, as well as a spot-on impression from former SNL alum Jay Pharoah, there is little else to go on. Even Reddit threads pondering the lack of material, with some posting that President Obama’s more polished behavior, especially after the bumbles of President George W. Bush, protected him. Others, however, have accused the media, which tends to lean liberal, of shielding him. “In a new book, ‘Politics Is a Joke!’ three academics tabulated 100,000 jokes told by late-night comics over the last 20 years. They found that in 2008 only six percent of the jokes were about Obama (Palin attracted nearly as many jokes in four months as a public figure as he did all year). And those jokes had a tendency to be about as barbed as cotton candy,” wrote Kyle Smith in 2014, noting that the GOP got jabbed twice as much. SNL’s Jim Downey even offered a small rebuke at the time, stating the show had become “an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment…” He went on to say, “We just stopped doing anything which could even be misinterpreted as a criticism of Obama.”