Betty White, who died Dec. 31 at age 99, was perhaps the greatest comic tactician in the history of television.
Betty White, who died Dec.31 at age 99, was perhaps the greatest comic tactician in the history of television. That’s 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 “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” for instance, her sunny domestic goddess Sue Ann Nivens was purposefully oblivious, and White wrung delicious humor out of Sue Ann’s unwillingness or inability to see that not everyone in the room was charmed by her. And on “The Golden Girls,” 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 “The Golden Girls,” and Rue McClanahan got its best lines, but it was White who gave the series its sprightliness, and its soul. Rose — a character who was, as written, very easily the butt of the joke — 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’s 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’d been on a sitcom about aging gracefully starting in the mid-1980s, was, by the time she appeared on the sitcom “Hot in Cleveland” 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’s on her mind, in polite but direct tones.
