Betty White scores with Saturday Night Live

They were saying on Twitter yesterday, “Betty White is killing it on Saturday Night Live.”

The 88 (and a half) year old actress hosted the show and appeared in several sketches, following Facebook campaign to get her on the show.

The episode was also the biggest of the series and had the largest audience since the Obama election, according to early figures.

White showed she still has what it takes: comic timing, self-deprecating humour and an ability to move with the times by referencing youthful concepts and lingo.

As the LA Times said:
Indeed, the most common way to have fun with old people on TV or in film is to have them act as if they were young people. Making them talk about sex or swear, or take drugs, or use language they’re the wrong age to use is an easy laugh that contemporary comedy writers do not seem able to resist or improve upon, or think up alternatives to. (In an earlier generation, it was hilarious enough just to put them on a motorcycle or a surfboard.) This was the main thrust of White’s “SNL” stand, through her appearances as the grandmother of Will Forte’s MacGruber, the grandmother of Keenan Thompson’s “scared-straight” counselor, and the geriatric detective on “CSI: Sarasota” (“On CBS, the old people network”). It was the sole point of her nine utterances of the word “lesbian” (or “lez,” as a verb) in a sort of “Meet Me in St. Louis” sketch, and of the salacious variations on the word “muffin” in a routine about a public-radio food show, hosted by a briefly returning Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer, as in “My muffin hasn’t had a cherry since 1939.” (Though, to be fair, that routine had the same purpose when Alec Baldwin was the guest and the salient word was “balls.”)

NY Times said:
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).