According to Hollywood, there is nothing funnier than a sassy old granny. Especially if she's rapping. Especially if she's rapping while wearing funky sunglasses. Ho boy! That's funny business.

Of course, grandpas can be funny too, but they don't get to be sassy. They just get to be dopey. And forgetful. And deaf. A dopey old man who forgets things is funny, but a dopey old man who forgets things and also can't hear what you're saying is extra-especially funny.

The patron saints of Funny Old People are, of course, Estelle Getty on the Golden Girls and Grampa Simpson. Estelle Getty got to be sassy -- laying into the other, almost-but-not-quite-as-sassy old ladies on the show with her heat-seeking zingers ญญ while Grampa Simpson is simply dopey, forgetful, and deaf. (Like many characters on The Simpsons, Grandpa Simpson is an example of a flaccid comedy caricature that's been miraculously enlivened. The world-weary clown, the doughnut-loving cop, and the territorial East Indian convenience-store owner aren't exactly radical new comedic configurations either, yet somehow they all work.)

If there were a novelty chess set made up of entirely of Funny Old People, Estelle Getty and Grampa Simpson would be the queen and the king. But every other piece -- the rooks, bishops, pawns, and so on -- would pretty much have to be tiny little effigies of Ellen Albertini Dow.

When people talk about late-life blossoming, they often mention Grandma Moses, who painted her first painting at age seventy-eight, or Pauline Kael, who landed her career-making New Yorker job at age forty-eight. No one ever talks about Ellen Albertini Dow, who was born in 1918 but didn't earn her first screen credit until 1985, at the age of sixty-eight, when she played a geriatric serial killer in an episode of the Twilight Zone series. She's worked consistently since, playing sassy, wacky, crazy, and/or goofy grannies; most notably, she was the rapping granny in The Wedding Singer; her cameo in the trailer ("I said a hip-hop, the hippie to the hippie, to the hip-hip-hop, and you don't stop") sent roughly half of the nation's moviegoers into hysterics and the other half into paroxysms of eye-rolling, meant to signal their disgust at yet another movie exploiting the "sassy rapping granny" conceit, a comedic teat long since milked dry.

Yet Ellen Albertini Dow raps on, and rocks on, as such sassy grannies as "Disco Dottie" in 54, "Mrs. Mackenzie" in Ready to Rumble, "Grandma Manilow" in Road Trip, and, most recently, the wacky, senile Grandma Harriet in the Malcolm in the Middle-alike sitcom Maybe It's Me. And we'll say this: she is really, really good at playing a sassy granny. In fact, maybe she, and not Estelle Getty, should be the Queen of Sassy Grannies. They should at least have to fight for it, with the bout televised on Showtime.