Review – Betty White’s Off Their Rockers

Betty White’s Off Their Rockers – NBC – 1 Season – USA

Back in January NBC premiered Betty White’s Off Their Rockers as part of their celebration of White’s 90^th birthday, with the rest of the season to come later in the year. Off Their Rockers is a prank show where the pranksters are all old people and the ‘victims’ are all young whippersnappers. This whole show is banking on a few things in order to find an audience. First and foremost it hopes that Betty White is more than just a passing meme that brought her back into the comedy limelight years after everybody had stopped thinking about Betty White. Second is that people are still somehow interested in prank shows. Lastly the show puts a lot of faith in the idea that old people are inherently funny simply because they are old.

On that first point Betty White, who does little more than deliver a few gags in between all of the candid camera antics, is still the master of the one-liner. There is a reason that the 90 year old White has made a resurgence popping up in cameos and hosting SNL. Betty White is still really funny and she manages to deliver some real clunkers that don’t sound as bad coming from her. The only problem with White is not her fault so much as the material she’s often reduced to delivering. This is true for most of her appearance but there’s somebody out there who thinks that Betty White being overtly sexual is hilarious and that’s no longer true. Once in a while, White wanting to smear frosting over the bare chest of a male model might be amusing but having White act like an insatiable sex fiend in every appearance is boring.

That same point holds true for all of the pranks that don’t really work in Off Their Rockers. Betty White doesn’t appear in the pranks themselves, she’s simply there to offer name recognition to the show but the old folks they’ve got pranking the young people often resort to those same ‘old people saying things you wouldn’t expect old people to say’ gags. One prank finds an old lady propositioning a man in an airport longue asking if he’d like to join the mile-high club with her. This is only supposed to be funny because old people don’t say things like that and the idea of an old woman having sex is supposed to be amusing. There’s another prank where an old man asks a young lady to take his photo but then reappears nude. You take these same ‘jokes’ and replay them with young people and they become creepy and inappropriate but because they’re old it’s supposed to be funny.

The same goes for anytime the show gets an old person to swear or have an inappropriate conversation with somebody. This is the ‘nice old lady giving the finger’ gag only it has been done to death so many times by so many comedies over the years that these gags can only feel tired. More successful are the pranks that allow the ‘victims’ to laugh it off after it happens. My favourite was the one where a little old lady was handed a huge bunch of balloons and began floating away into the air before somebody had to run to her rescue and pull her down. It’s not a terribly exciting or groundbreaking prank but it’s far more amusing than that same old lady propositioning somebody for sex.

As far as prank shows go there have been far more unnecessary creations than this one. What Off Their Rockers does have going for it is that unlike some prank shows it doesn’t repeat the pranks. We don’t see the same old guy trick a dozen different people into believing he’s a blind man driving a car. We see him do it once and the show moves on to the next gag. Off Their Rockers doesn’t rest on a single joke for five minutes it powers through a variety of jokes. There are so many jokes and most of them are so good natured that Off Their Rockers makes for a reasonably enjoyable if completely disposable half hour of television.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright