Indeed, the most common way to have fun with old people on TV or in film is to have them act as if they were young people. Making them talk about sex or swear, or take drugs, or use language they're the wrong age to use is an easy laugh that contemporary comedy writers do not seem able to resist or improve upon, or think up alternatives to. (In an earlier generation, it was hilarious enough just to put them on a motorcycle or a surfboard.) This was the main thrust of White's "SNL" stand, through her appearances as the grandmother of Will Forte's MacGruber, the grandmother of Keenan Thompson's "scared-straight" counselor, and the geriatric detective on "CSI: Sarasota" ("On CBS, the old people network"). It was the sole point of her nine utterances of the word "lesbian" (or "lez," as a verb) in a sort of "Meet Me in St. Louis" sketch, and of the salacious variations on the word "muffin" in a routine about a public-radio food show, hosted by a briefly returning Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer, as in "My muffin hasn't had a cherry since 1939." (Though, to be fair, that routine had the same purpose when Alec Baldwin was the guest and the salient word was "balls.")

Granted, there is something wonderfully encouraging about seeing anyone still in the game -- any game -- on the verge of 90, and whatever else she is to the culture (human pet, link to the past), White is above all an energetic and accomplished working actress. (She has a new sitcom, "Hot in Cleveland,"coming on TVLand in June.) Although some of the current Betty White Moment is a matter of her merely having lasted -- like a redwood tree or Gothic cathedral -- it is more particularly that she has lasted long enough for people to remember, or to learn, that she is is funny, and funny in a special Betty White way. Even before she was old and raunchy -- at least as far back as her stint on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" -- she was playing a comedy of contrasts, of salty and sweet: a serpent with a face made to sell cake mix.

If the material Saturday night was not always stellar and was, at times, totally earthbound, it was funny often enough, and sometimes when it wasn't funny, the show was incidentally touching. To balance (for "Mother's Day") a cast that skews decisively male, the producers brought back a flock of female stars from seasons not-long past, not only Shannon and Gasteyer, but also Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and Tina Fey, whose pas-de-deux with the host in a sketch about census-taking had a flavor that was both absurd and down-to-earth. They seemed especially pleased to be there to support White and to work with her. White, in turn, given flowers at the end, thanked a cast that had been "so dear to a very scared but happy host."