Betty White did it: at age 88 — and literally by popular (Facebook) demand — she hosted Saturday Night Live. Here’s video of the opening sketch:
Here’s another sketch that many critics today are writing about:
A spoof on the old Lawrence Welk Show which still runs on PBS:
NBC’s website offers this interview with White about her thoughts on hosting Saturday Night Live:
Here’s one of the promos NBC used that featured White hyping the show:
Why is there always such a buzz about White?
She is an actress-comedienne who knows her craft, but has always had a special place in audience’s hearts. That stems from her professionalism, comedy timing — and sheer likability. Many years ago my mother Helen Gandelman bumped into White and, to this day when my mother is in her 80s, she’ll happily tell you about what nice and good humored person she is (she won’t say the same thing about a politician she met years ago who is nationally famous today). White has literally gotten a thumbs up from generations of Americans — and now sets a record for being SNL’s oldest host.
Here’s some of the media buzz today:
—MTV:
At 88 1/2 years old, “The Proposal” star Betty White proved she’s one of America’s hardest-working grandmothers as she cursed, kicked and roughed up young hoodlums on this week’s episode of “Saturday Night Live,” featuring musical guest Jay-Z.
Eschewing its usual political cold open, the show opted for a “Lawrence Welk Show” Mother’s Day tribute sketch, bringing back many of the series’ famous female stars, including Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Ana Gasteyer, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Molly Shannon. White’s appearance in the sketch garnered prolonged applause from the studio audience.
Later, in her opening monologue, White joked about her age and the Facebook campaign that brought her to the “SNL” stage.
“When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I didn’t know what Facebook was,” she said. “Now that I do know what it is, it sounds like a huge waste of time.”
Not surprisingly, White played some variation of a grandmother figure in nearly every sketch, to hilarious effect. She drove a motorized scooter as MacGruber’s nana, whom he confessed his undying love for and ultimately (and oh-so awkwardly) proposed marriage to. She donned a khaki jumpsuit to play tough-as-nails Grandma MacIntosh in Kenan Thompson’s recurring “Scared Straight” sketch. And in a jab at CBS’ older viewership, she portrayed a crime-fighting senior citizen in the spin-off “CSI: Sarasota.
All it took to reinvigorate a 35-year-old comedy show was the presence of an 88-year-old woman.
On Saturday, after more than 70 years in show business, six Emmy Awards and one improbable Facebook campaign, Betty White finally got her shot at hosting “Saturday Night Live.”
Historically, “SNL” doesn’t always come through for its most heavily hyped hosts: students of the show’s 1990s-era antiquity may recall episodes featuring Nancy Kerrigan and Jim Carrey that were highly rated but low on comedy, and a program from March hosted by Zach Galifianakis didn’t quite fulfill its potential. But Saturday’s show was one of the strongest outings of the season. With energy, enthusiasm and plain old laughs, Ms. White and the “SNL” cast and crew (including an ensemble of recent alumnae) more than delivered on this much promoted episode’s promise.
Despite Ms. White’s confession in her opening monologue that she was uneasy with live television, she was right at home with the “SNL” format. She appeared in every sketch of the show and seemed game for just about anything, whether she was playing an inadvertently naughty muffin mogul or a loopy census interviewee. She even turned up on “Weekend Update” as an elderly rival to Molly Shannon’s Sally O’Malley character, and in a digital short performing a punk-rock version of the “Golden Girls” theme song (with a little help from a stunt double, I’m presuming).
—Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker:
The cheers and applause that Betty White received during the Saturday Night Live cold-open sketch told you everything you needed to know about the momentum White had going into this week. The sketch was one of SNL‘s fine Lawrence Welk parodies, and White had only a small part in it, but that didn’t matter: After months of grassroots campaigning, White’s appearance was its own reward: The audience was applauding as much for itself and its pop-culture populist power as it was for White herself.
..Of course, this being SNL, many of the sketches simply played off the idea of an old woman saying something naughty… over and over and over. Whether she was playing an old lady in 1904 sitting in a corner calling Poehler’s character a lesbian, or making a double entendre of the word “muffin” in one of Shannon and Gasteyer’s NPR spoofs, White was willing to be as vulgar as the writers wanted. While the NPR sketch tried too hard and failed to surpass its obvious model — Alec Baldwin’s “Schweddy Balls” moment — sometimes White’s willingness to deliver a crass line with gusto was fun. She got fully into the spirit of a “Scared Straight” sketch, joining Kenan Thompson as a tough con threatening teen criminals with a visit to “The Wizard of Ass.”…
….While there’s a lot of adoration out there for White, there’s also a certain percentage of condescension to the fulsomeness, including within the media covering White. Over the past few weeks, the elements of “isn’t she cute?” and “aren’t we nice to be lavishing our love on an old person?” that accounts for some of White-mania can be irritating. Thankfully, these qualities didn’t emanate from the SNL cast last night. And clearly, White is making the most of her moment; the show ran both her Snickers ad and a promo for a could-be-fun, might-be-winceable new TV Land series Hot in Cleveland.
If the actress best known for her work in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Golden Girls” and musical guest Jay-Z weren’t enough (alas, no duet between the two), last night’s Mother’s Day-themed episode served as an SNL reunion of sorts. Tina Fey (“30 Rock”), Amy Poehler (“Parks and Recreation”), Molly Shannon, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer and Maya Rudolph dropped by, reminding viewers that the late-night show not so long ago boasted a strong contingent of female sketch artists.
Not that White needed any help.
She was delightful across the 90-minute show….
White’s rising star in the last year is a testament to the power of social media and a happy development in a pop culture that seems to be getting tired of all things pretty and perky.
—NPR:
The first thing that must be said about Betty White’s Internet-demanded appearance hosting Saturday Night Live is that it never had a chance of living up to the highest of hopes for it. It is, after all, still Saturday Night Live, where uneven writing reigns supreme.
But you have to give the show — and White — this: they certainly didn’t prop her up there as host and then not do anything with her, tiptoeing around her the way they sometimes do around sports figures and other hosts who make for good PR but can’t actually do the work. They also didn’t give her an age-adjusted schedule, letting her nap between contributions just because she happens to be 88 years old.
On the contrary, White was in every single sketch, and she was on “Weekend Update,” and she was at the center of the digital short. When it was announced that Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Molly Shannon, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, and Ana Gasteyer — basically the entire small army of SNL women that completely changed the show’s gender dynamics over the last ten years — would all appear, it seemed to raise the possibility that nobody was sure White was up to a whole solo hosting job and that she might be in just a few sketches.
Even Jay-Z worships at the altar of Betty White. And why wouldn’t he?
At the end of his second song on this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live,” the appropriate “Young Forever,” Jay-Z dedicated his performance to the host, “the most incredible Betty White.”
Saturday’s whole show was one big celebration of White, from the commercials featuring the actress to her game presence in every sketch. A number of the skits didn’t do much more than trade on her saucy-grandma image, and there wasn’t necessarily a classic moment in the 90-minute show.
Still, White proved why she’s getting work at age 88 — her comic delivery is still formidable. Of course she nailed all the naughty stuff, but given enjoyably silly material, as she was in sketches with Kenan Thompson, Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey, she killed. The show would be smart to extend an open invitation to White to return as host any time, but given how in demand she is, who knows if she’d be able to make it back?
If there wasn’t a sidesplitting “Hamm & Buble” moment (and how I wished for a Jay-Z-Betty White collaboration, a la Jon Hamm and Michael Buble’s 2009 “SNL” skit), White at least had some effective zingers in her opening monologue.
Betty White, the oddest comet in our crowded celebrity sky, did nothing to diminish her stature last night as she hosted “Saturday Night Live.”
In fact, there was probably more at stake for the show, which has suffered this season from postelection ratings and creative depression.
That may help explain why it put the 88-1/2-year-old White into every skit, whether there was a joke waiting there for her or not.
..It’s possible that putting White in every sketch was a subtle commentary on the bizarre way in which she seems to have saturated popular culture over the last few months.
As she suggested in her monologue, however, overexposure isn’t a bad problem to have at the age of 88 – and a half.
Not all reviews were positive. USA Today’s Robert Blanco:
Think of it as another Facebook faux pas.
Perhaps no show could have lived up to expectations created for this week’s Saturday Night Liveby the Facebook campaign that got Betty White her first hosting job after a 35-year wait. And in the grand scheme of things, 90 mediocre minutes with White is still preferable to time spent with most anyone else, if only because our collective affection for her makes even the worst material look a little better.
Yet in the end, Saturday’s overhyped NBC broadcast mostly served to explain why SNL seemed so reluctant to bring White on board. Clearly, they didn’t know what to do with her.
So they had her make some blue jokes, bear the brunt of multiple “isn’t she old” jokes, and pump for the upcoming MacGruber movie — and then make a few more blue jokes. I realize White’s juxtaposition of angelic manner and gutter language has proven to be a sure-fire laugh-getter — but 90 minutes of it? Surely after the first dozen times she says “lesbian” or makes some sexual reference or gets bleeped out for cursing, the routine begins to lose some of its punch.
None of this was White’s fault, who once again proved that she is both a pro and an extremely good sport. What laughs there were, outside of Weekend Update, were pretty much provided by her and her alone, and that’s not something you can say about every host.
She just deserved better. And after a 35 year wait, so did we.
Go the links to read these reviews in full.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.