This Is the ‘SNL’ Host Who Killed at Dress Rehearsal More Than Any Other

As most fans of Saturday Night Live are well aware, the cast and crew actually perform two shows for each episode: There’s the version that makes it to the air, and a dress rehearsal that serves as a test run for the cast, which also allows Lorne Michaels to cut any sketches that don’t get big laughs from the studio audience — except, of course, for “Fart Face.” 

On the most recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Meyers recalled that the most successful dress rehearsal he ever witnessed during his tenure at the show starred a host who was older than frozen food: Betty White.

White hosted the Mother’s Day weekend show back in 2010, after a grassroots Facebook campaign called “Betty White to Host SNL (Please?)!” went viral. It’s not that the show had never asked her (she had previously rejected three invitations to host), and even in 2010, she reportedly wasn’t so sure about trekking to New York.

At 88, White became the oldest person to ever host SNL. And, surprising absolutely no one, she killed. Her monologue found her hilariously dunking on the Facebook fans who wanted her to host the show in the first place.

And she perfectly fit into pre-existing sketch molds, like “The Lawrence Welk Show,” “Delicious Dish” and the old census taker bit.

It wasn’t just the live show that went well, the dress rehearsal got a huge response from the crowd, too. Perhaps the best ever. “The hottest dress I was ever at was the Betty White show,” Meyers explained. The reaction was so huge, that Michaels actually went “back up to his office early because he knew he had the show. And the last two sketches, it didn't matter how well they went, he had his show.

But while Michaels was sequestered in his office, confident that he had all the sketches he needed for a killer episode, the cast performed “Scared Straight,” the recurring sketch in which a criminal, played by Kenan Thompson, is recruited by the police to terrifying young ruffians into obeying the law. The Betty White-starring version of the material found the Golden Girls star playing Thompson’s grandmother “Loretta,” who somehow believes that The Wizard of Oz actually happened to her.

Michaels wasn’t around to see the sketch in dress, but according to Meyers, it “destroyed at a level I’ve never seen.” So Meyers ran up to Michaels’ office to let him know that he was missing the biggest sketch of the night. “It was like a scene from a movie where I said to Lorne, ‘Lorne, I think you might wanna watch this!’”

Kind of like Back to the Future, if instead of playing Chuck Berry, Marty McFly was insisting that the events of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory were early childhood memories.