  Betty White, who hosts Saturday Night Live this weekend. |
Don’t expect any drug jokes when Betty White hosts Saturday Night Live this weekend.
“I won’t do any dope jokes,” said White, 88. “I don’t like dope jokes. I don’t think dope is a joke. That’s about the only ‘no’ that I would, let’s say, resist doing.
“I don’t think dope is funny or fun or whatever.”
Upon hearing White’s comments, we thought to ourselves, well, it’s a good thing White is hosting Saturday Night Live in 2010 and not, say, 1978.
Have you seen any of those old SNL shows — with John Belushi, Bill Murray and Laraine Newman, etc. — in recent years? What really jumps out are all the drug references, clearly revealing a mind-set among the cast and writers that piling as much drug terminology as possible into a skit not only was funny, but also cool.
As hilarious as some of the stuff is, the drug jokes make it all seem quite dated and, frankly, foolish.
Well, Betty White is neither dated nor foolish, so the increasingly bland SNL is hoping for a boost this weekend (NBC, Global).
White was asked to host SNL after a Facebook campaign floated the idea and quickly attracted thousands of supporters.
“All of a sudden people would tell me that they saw the Facebook thing and all these people had joined in,” White said. “I couldn’t believe it. At first I thought they were putting me on.
“I told my agent to please say, ‘Thank you, I appreciate it, but no thank you.’ He said, ‘You have to do it.’ I love my agent, so here I am, scared to death.”
White said one of her biggest worries is that SNL makes major use of cue-cards, and she doesn’t want to screw up without her glasses. How sweet is that?
Of course, the fact that White seems so sweet but also can be verbally raw has been a big part of her appeal. White is an octogenarian Sarah Silverman, sweet and shocking at the same time.
“Sometimes I see double-entendre where it really doesn’t exist,” White said. “I have no idea what I’m going to say.”
Equally, TV watchers have no idea where White is going to pop up these days. She really is everywhere, with appearances on current sitcoms (she guest-stars in the season-finale of The Middle later this month, and also has a regular role on an upcoming show called Hot in Cleveland for the U.S. cable network TV Land), late-night talk shows (The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, primarily) and celebrity roasts.
And you can’t tune into one of the countless rerun channels for more than seven seconds and not see White’s face on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or The Golden Girls, or a wacky old game show.
Has this burst of attention and non-stop adulation in the 21st century been a shock to White’s system?
“Well, not to my system, but it blows my mind,” White said. “I can’t get over, at my age, what all’s going on.”
You won’t hear any drug jokes from Betty White’s lips this weekend, but with SNL alumni such as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joining the fun, just about anything else is possible.
“All I know is I have veto power if it’s something I really don’t want to do,” White said. “They promised I wouldn’t have to do any nudity.”
bill.harris@sunmedia.ca
