Joy Browne

Joy Browne (October 24, 1944—August 27, 2016), also known as Dr. Joy, was an American talk show host, specializing in advice counselling. She hosted a nationally syndicated call-in talk show for several decades, heard on numerous radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.

Browne was born Joy Oppenheim in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of five children born to Nelson Oppenheim, a life insurance salesman, and teacher Ruth Strauss. She spent much of her childhood in Denver, Colorado and graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas with a bachelor's degree in behavioral science.

Browne did her graduate work at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, earning an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology. She was a licensed clinical psychologist who was first on the air in Boston at WITS, where she did a program called Up Close and Personal in the late 1970s. She later hosted call-in shows on radio stations in San Francisco and New York City.

Her syndicated show was one of the longest-running call-in therapy shows in the United States. Browne took a no-nonsense approach to callers, trying to zero in on a problem without getting caught up in a caller's long stories or digressions. Browne was also known for her "one-year rule", which states that people who have lost a spouse or long-time partner due to break-up, death, or divorce should wait at a minimum one year before resuming romantic relationships. Dr. Joy was known for her phrase "stupid and cheerful" for dealing with difficult people. Browne has also half-jokingly suggested that people wait until they are 40 or 45 years old before having sex, due to the emotional nakedness involved, in addition to the physical.

Dr. Browne hosted a TV show on the Discovery Health cable channel in 2005 which was a live one-hour simulcast of her weekday show on WOR. She previously hosted a King World-Eyemark weekday syndicated TV advice talk show in 1999 for one year.

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