Best Of Betty White – TCA Press Tour Day 1

TV Land kicked off the first day of the semiannual Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena today. The soon-to-be 89-year-old Betty White was on fire riffling out a bevy of zingers as she discussed her popularity, SNL, the success of Hot in Cleveland, who she thought was hot and Facebook.

Betty White and Valerie Bertinelli

“What is this Betty White business?” White asks.  “This is silly.  Really, it is very silly.  You’ve had such an overdose of me lately.  Trust me.  I think I’m going to go away for a while. That’s going to be hard to do since White’s never been hotter, and, she’s got problems saying “no.”

“It’s hard for me to say no to a job because you spend your career thinking if you say ‘no,’ they’ll never ask you again, and if you don’t take the job, you know, that may be the end of it.” But White wasn’t done, she then adds: “My mother taught me to say ‘no’ when I was a girl, but that wasn’t about show business.”

She modestly changes subject when asked about her impeccable timing and humor.  “Oh, my dear.  Have I

got you fooled.” She credits her parents and her upbringing for her sense of humor.“I was an only child with a wonderful mother and father, and they both had delicious senses of humor.  So we would — we laughed a lot, and we made a lot of jokes, and I just kind of — you grow up kind of looking at the funny side rather than the negative side, and it gets you t

hrough some very bad times sometimes.”

As her fellow Hot in Cleveland cast members (Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick) answer a question on women they think are hot — stating stars like Helen Mirren, Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep — White simply shrugs and says: “I like guys better.”

On SNL she advised her colleagues  not to wear heels. “Because between sketches, they grab you by the hand,

[pull you] into a closet about the size of this table, and somebody’s taking off your clothes, and somebody else is putting it on while the makeup girl is doing this, and the wig person is taking off one wig and putting the other on, and then they drag you back on stage, and you think, ‘What sketch are we doing?’ It’s panic time, but it’s good panic.”

It was Facebook that started the idea of White hosting SNL, however, she had no clue what Facebook was. “ I didn’t know what Facebook was, and I still don’t.  I’m sorry. … I don’t have a computer because I get a lot of mail, but I can stack those in stacks and throw this stack out without answering, and then I get to this stack.  But if I punched the button and stored something in a computer, I wouldn’t sleep at night wondering what was stored in there.  I’m a technological spaz.”

The second season of Hot in Cleveland returns to TV Land Jan. 19.