LIZ: Now look, is it true that you’re antisocial?

WHOOPI: Yes.

LIZ: I hear you like to stay in bed with your hat on and eat and drink and watch TV and movies. And you hate to go out.

WHOOPI: When I’m on the bus — you know I don’t fly — so when I’m on my bus, that’s me. I’m in the bed with my movies and my books, and that’s how I travel across the country.

LIZ: Also, we understand, Whoopi, that you are a very rich woman. And you know our Mary Wells Lawrence has written a posting for us, How to Become a Millionaire. So, we wondered if you have any ideas about how to do that.

WHOOPI: You know what? I say get the scratch-offs and hope for the best. I like my lottery tickets. One of the things I’ve never been good at was making dough.

LIZ: Really? Oh, but you work so hard. I guess you’ve just earned it. You’ve made more movies than almost anybody. I counted them. There were just hundreds of them!

WHOOPI: Yeah. But I don’t own any of them. You know what I mean?

LIZ: So you don’t feel you’ve made gobs of money from acting?

WHOOPI: No. For other people I have, yes. I put many people’s children through college.

LIZ: You create controversy everywhere you go. I don’t think you mean to. I think this just happens. Is that because you’re a true contrarian and a revolutionary at heart?

WHOOPI: I don’t know if I’m a true contrarian, but I just have a lot of questions and sometimes I’ve discovered that asking questions is not what people want you to do. They want you to just …

LIZ: Go along.

WHOOPI: Yes, and I’m not good at it because I find that if you just go along, it’s easy for people to leave you out there hanging. See, because everybody talks a good game until the shit hits the fan. And when the shit hits the fan, everybody disappears.

LIZ: Right. Well I remember that you’ve been misunderstood in many instances. I mean, the remarks about George W. Bush were taken out of context and then when you first came on The View, I thought there was a lot of mishigosh. And so, chiefly, what do people misunderstand about you?

WHOOPI: I think, more than anything, that my intentions are never to aggravate anybody, but just to understand and to say what I see. Mort Sahl was one of my heroes. And Mort always said what he saw. He reported on what he saw. His humor was about us as human beings. And so, in my crazy way, I thought I could do the same thing.

LIZ: Well, you know, I think it’s true. I don’t think you’re honestly confrontational.

WHOOPI: No, I’m not.

LIZ: You’re extremely civilized. If everybody in the world was as polite and nice as you are, it would be great. But I think you just say what you think and people are so full of bullshit that they don’t know what they’re getting.

WHOOPI: Well, it’s the funniest thing, you know. Since I took this job on The View, people say, “Well, you’re so nice.” And I said to myself, “Well, I was never …” I don’t think I was ever mean. I’ve had my moments with people who aggravated me. You know, where I’ve … I might have, like anybody else, gotten pissed off about something. But surely not … not evil. And I’m a comic. And so my job is to make it funny.