Betty White Delivers On Saturday Night Live
Is Carol Burnett Next?
After months of campaigning by a group on Facebook entitled “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!”, the 88-year-old actress became the oldest person ever to host Saturday Night Live when she hosted the show’s special Mother’s Day episode on May 8th 2010. The grassroots campaign that led to White’s hosting was founded on Facebook in January 2010 by 29-year-old fan David Mathews. On March 11th, when it was confirmed that White would indeed host the show on May 8th, Mathews’s Facebook group had nearly half a million members.
The Golden Girls star, equally well known for her role as happy homemaker Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, recently received the Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her 60 plus years of excellence in show business. Just as sharp as ever, White was a huge hit on SNL, appearing in every single sketch, and delivering the laughs like a pro. Digital video transfers of her monologue began appearing on the Internet only minutes after the live broadcast began.
Her monologue was classic Betty White – deadpan one-liners delivered with impeccable comedic timing. She even gave a shout-out to Facebook, jesting that it “sounds like a huge waste of time.” White showed no reservations about making fun of her own old age. “Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up,” she said. “We had phonebook, but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon with it.”
With digital video transfers of Betty’s antics crowding the Internet before the show even finished airing on the east coast, it is no wonder that SNL, now in its 35th year, achieved its highest ratings for nearly two years with White at the helm. Entertainment Weekly reported that SNL’s ratings were up 66 percent in Nielsen-metered homes over the same week from 2009.
Fresh from the glow of success, the Facebook masses have now assigned themselves a new task, this time to give veteran comedienne Carol Burnett a chance to host TV’s longest-running comedy show. There are currently two “Carol Burnett to Host SNL” fan pages vying for NBC’s attention, and together they have over 100,000 fans. When Saturday Night Live was launched in the mid 1970s, The Carol Burnett Show was already a hit, and one of sketch comedy’s biggest successes. The Carol Burnett Show ran from 1967 to 1978.
