How Betty White Became Hip and Edgy

Anybody who watched Betty White's guest host appearance on Saturday Night Live--and a lot of you out there did, since it was the most-viewed SNL episode since 2008--had to marvel at the 88-year-old actress's ability to not only seem hip and edgy despite her age, but to utilize it as a comedic device. She showed an ironic deftness that at times seemed almost Andy Kaufman-esque in its calculated cringe-worthiness. (Btw, I had to double-check Wikipedia to make sure that White hadn't portrayed the elderly cowboy musical star that the late comedian pretended to pressure into riding on a hobby horse in the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon. But it turns out that was actually an equally remarkable talent, former Ziegfeld Girl Doris Eaton Travis, who reportedly is still dancing at the age of 106.)

But as usual, I digress. What strikes me about Betty White, aside from the fact that she seems so astonishingly energetic and agile, is her genius at using self-deprecating humor to reinvent herself.

She doesn't seem concerned that we're going to remember that she's a few decades down the pike from her role as nasty, libidinous Sue Ann "The Happy Homemaker" Nivens in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or her portrayal of naïve widow Rose Nylund in The Golden Girls. To the contrary, she seems to want us to remember, and to know that she's in on the joke, even if she pretends otherwise. It's a trick that's also been successfully employed by a number of other aging stars who've turned hip self-parody into an art form. The most notable example, perhaps, is William Shatner. In recent years, the actor-author-singer has fashioned a hugely successful second (or third, perhaps) career largely out of poking fun at his first career as stiffly serious, interplanetary action-hero, chick-magnet Captain James T. Kirk in the original 1960s Star Trek TV series. He's also gotten plenty of comedic mileage out of mocking his own ill-advised youthful attempt to become a rock star by recording bizarre Rex Harrison-style spoken interpretations of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and other songs. And who could forget the late Jack Palance, jokingly performing one-armed pushups as a septuagenarian at the 1992 Academy Awards ceremony?

That sort of humor, in a sense, is a way of showing one's indifference toward the inevitability of aging, and refusing to allow to become an obstacle. What White and Shatner are really saying with their geriatric schtick is that they're confident in who they are now, and that they still have plenty left to offer. Indeed, motivational author Steve Chandler sees humor as an integral part of self-reinvention--"dream, laugh, reinvent, love" is the mantra he recommends. As you can see from White's performance on SNL, that approach seems to work pretty well.