Dolly Parton Would ‘Cringe’ at This Type of Joke
Dolly Parton cracks jokes and laughs so often that it isn’t out of the ordinary to hear her giggle on her records. She is quick to poke fun at herself and is happy to banter with interviewers whenever she gets the chance. There are some types of humor that Parton does not like, though. Her guitarist said Parton would cringe whenever she heard one.
Dolly Parton didn’t appreciate jokes about religion
Guitarist Don Roth traveled with Parton on tour and got to know her well. She was generally playful, but there were some forms of humor she would not tolerate. He learned this when he made a joke in front of her.
“I’m relatively sacrilegious and would make Easter jokes about Jesus turning water into wine by palming a grape fizzy, and she would just cringe and say, ‘Oh, please, Don, don’t,’” he said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “It wasn’t that she thought lightning was going to strike the house, but she really didn’t like it.”
When Parton hosted Saturday Night Live in 1989, she made a similar request. She was up for almost anything, but she didn’t want to touch the subject of religion.
“I loved Dolly Parton,” cast member Jan Hooks said in Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. “She came in and said, ‘Look, okay, here’s the deal. I won’t use any cuss words and I won’t make fun of Jesus.’ Those were her two demands. And anything else was carte blanche.”
She said she didn’t actually consider herself a Christian
While Parton would not make fun of organized religion, she did not consider herself a Christian. Though she was a deeply spiritual person, she didn’t typically put that label on herself.
“I know that the Bible says you must believe and be baptized — and I do believe in God and I have been baptized — but I don’t consider myself a Christian,” she said. “I would like to think that I have a Christian outlook on life as far as the way I treat people. I feel like that one wrong thing you do to somebody else is a sin. But for me to say that I am a good Christian, I would have to be devotin’ the same kind of time to God and givin’ him all my efforts the way that I am with this business.”
Dolly Parton wasn’t opposed to raunchy jokes
Beyond the type of joke Roth cracked, Parton doesn’t shy away from many types of humor. She often makes crude jokes to shock people.
“Once in a restaurant at a fairly private table, I took out my famous pair and put them on a platter on the edge of the table,” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “‘Here you go, Sandy,’ I said, ‘I’m laying ’em out for you.’ That platter was cold, but I’ll do anything for a good joke on Sandy [Gallin]. Thank God the press wasn’t there for that one.”
