Dolly Parton Admitted She Found Jokes About 1 Subject Hurtful and Embarrassing
Dolly Parton isn’t shy about making jokes at her own expense. When she appears on talk shows or onstage at concerts, she’ll often make a crack about her style or body. Earlier in her career, though, jokes like these hurt her deeply. She shared the subject she hated to hear people joke about.
Dolly Parton didn’t like to hear jokes about her appearance
Parton’s hair, makeup, clothing, and chest all make up her iconic look. They’ve also been the subject of jokes for decades. Her friend Jo Coulter told Alanna Nash in the book Dolly: The Biography that the jokes “hurt her very much. The remarks have often been cruel, and she’s very vulnerable and sensitive. People must think she has a shield of armor around her.”
Parton said she usually hid her discomfort. This didn’t mean the jokes didn’t sting.
“You know, you’d have to know me pretty well in order to know, but it embarrasses me and it hurts my feelings,” she said. “But, then, again, I’m smart enough to know that anytime anything is over-exaggerated like that — well, like my hair — and I’m such a small person that my figure is over-exaggerated.”
She knew that her physical appearance was hard to overlook, but she wanted people to recognize her for the type of person she was.
“I will admit that I have aplenty, but I’m not as ungodly and outrageous as people have made me out to be,” she said. “People just dwell on it all the time now, so it naturally — I want to be appreciated for what physical appearance that I may have as far as if it’s anything extraordinary. But I wanna be loved as me and appreciated as me first.”
Dolly Parton shared how she learned to embrace jokes about her appearance
While Parton used to dislike the jokes about her appearance, she came to accept them. Now, she often cracks them herself.
“It used to kind of embarrass me because I didn’t know quite how to take it,” she said. “But anymore I just kinda play along with it myself, and come up with some funny things. There’s no way to hide it, you know. That’s something you’re gonna have to accept. I could be ugly about it and say, ‘Don’t do that,’ but what is it they say about impersonatin’ somebody bein’ the greatest form of flattery? But anyhow, that’s just something I’ll have to live with.”
She disliked another type of joke
Parton had a bigger problem with another type of joke.
“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,’” her guitarist, Don Roth, said. “It wasn’t that she thought lightning was going to strike the house, but she really didn’t like it.”
When she hosted Saturday Night Live, she said she was happy to poke fun at everything but 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.”
