Betty White, who died Dec. 31 at age 99, was perhaps the greatest comic tactician in the history of television.<\/b>
\nBetty White, who died Dec.31 at age 99, was perhaps the greatest comic tactician in the history of television. That\u2019s distinct from comic acting, although White was, of course, a very fine actor. What set White apart was her unerring ability to find not just the joke, but the thing behind the joke: It was as if a special internal radar guided her toward the deflation of vanity. On \u201cThe Mary Tyler Moore Show,\u201d for instance, her sunny domestic goddess Sue Ann Nivens was purposefully oblivious, and White wrung delicious humor out of Sue Ann\u2019s unwillingness or inability to see that not everyone in the room was charmed by her. And on \u201cThe Golden Girls,\u201d her Rose Nylund was a variation on the form: A clueless naif who lived perpetually under the mistaken impression that she was just on the verge of figuring things out. Bea Arthur was the spirited center of \u201cThe Golden Girls,\u201d and Rue McClanahan got its best lines, but it was White who gave the series its sprightliness, and its soul. Rose \u2014 a character who was, as written, very easily the butt of the joke \u2014 sprang back from each insult or misunderstanding ready to zing again. White had a bright, gleeful delivery that could easily be made to convey a sort of dizzy cluelessness; beneath this hid a savage intelligence. A lesser performer would not have convinced you that the simplest of the Golden Girls so often won the group\u2019s verbal jousts, or made it seem, each time, quite so unexpected. As time went by and new generations became acquainted with her work, White continued to surprise. Part of this was due to her age and bearing: White, who\u2019d been on a sitcom about aging gracefully starting in the mid-1980s, was, by the time she appeared on the sitcom \u201cHot in Cleveland\u201d in 2010, among the last of her generation still working. White, resourceful and willing to go anywhere for a laugh, made frank use of her advanced years in her comedy: Her image, for contemporary audiences, is that of an older woman who says precisely what\u2019s on her mind, in polite but direct tones. When, for instance, she hosted \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d at 88 \u2014 the result of an outpouring of support online \u2014 White sweetly thanked the Facebook community, then told them, \u201cNow that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time.\u201d As written, this, like most of the generation-gap material in White\u2019s monologue, doesn\u2019t sparkle. But White makes it work, finding within the joke a whole narrative \u2014 we see her, throughout the monologue, performing an attempt to be polite and withhold her true opinion, letting loose, then hedging a bit, then going for it once more. Throughout her career, White\u2019s way with a joke was all the more effective not merely because her public image was so cuddly, but because she was so practiced at shrouding her humor within layers of manners and kindness. When a White character finally lets loose, it has all the more impact because of just how carefully she\u2019s constructed that character\u2019s social graces. In her later years, that character was most often herself; while \u201cHot in Cleveland\u201d lasted six seasons, White was throughout its run better-known as a celebrity \u2014 the sort of avatar of the wit elders possess \u2014 than as a performer. It\u2019s a credit to how natural she was as a performer that White and her performances got conflated, but it also elides, a bit, just how willing and eager she was to work. Betty White was known for being a personality that arched over the entertainment industry: She also, specifically, appeared in recent years in episodes of \u201cBones,\u201d \u201cCrowded,\u201d \u201cPound Puppies,\u201d \u201cThe Client List\u201d\u2026. These are appearances less impactful than her work, say, as Rose Nylund; in general, White was booked to be White, to lend a combination of sharpness and wit to productions that might not, on their own, have been organically able to get to either. But taken together they paint a picture of a performer who wanted, badly, to work \u2014 to be involved in things, to share her talent, to be part of a company. There\u2019s something reminiscent of Hollywood\u2019s earliest days \u2014 something that seems unlikely to come back \u2014 in White\u2019s relentless work ethic, both in finding the joke and in showing up. Before the film \u201cThe Proposal\u201d and her \u201cSNL\u201d appearance catapulted her to a late-in-life revival in fame, White joined the cast of \u201cThe Bold and the Beautiful\u201d in 2006. (A video of her work is available on YouTube; it\u2019s a straight dramatic performance, in which White plays a vain mother who cannot hear the truth.) White was, at this point, a legendary comic actress with four Emmys. Nothing was beneath White, and not because she lacked taste or sensibility \u2014 she instead put that taste and sensibility to work finding a lane that worked for her, making everything she was in as effective as it could be. An actor who could so elegantly find the humor in people\u2019s capacity for delusion had a plainness of approach that served her well into her nineties. It\u2019s tempting to reduce White\u2019s entire career to what happened in its last decade or so, and that would diminish a legacy that began in television\u2019s earliest days. But her work as an octogenarian and nonagenarian does deserve special mention. White, in showing up for work after many peers had stepped away, showed the world what older people can do. She also showed what honoring the legacy of old-school Hollywood can add to the contemporary industry: Few performers decades younger have White\u2019s effortlessness, her breezy certainty. That her skills, and her appetite to perform, harkened back to the medium\u2019s beginning meant that she was a sort of living emissary of aspects of television\u2019s legacy that have otherwise fallen away. White was, from \u201cSNL\u201d or so on, a figure out of time \u2014 a classic Hollywood actress in the contemporary landscape, earning fans who\u2019d never heard of Sue Ann Nivens. But through it all \u2014 from \u201cMary Tyler Moore\u201d to her most recent appearances \u2014 what comes through the screen even more than her warmth is her searching for just the right way to put a little topspin on the joke. And that\u2019s timeless.<\/p>\n