In May, Dolly Parton made a cheery social media announcement that she was canceling a planned residency in Las Vegas because of poor health. She delivered the bad news in the form of a five-minute roast of herself, in which she made fun of her wigs, her kidney stones, her costumes and the size of her breasts. At the video’s end, she acknowledged that she wasn’t getting any younger. But, she added: “As long as there are plastic surgeons in this world, I’m not getting any older.”
Parton, who died on Tuesday at 80, knew the power of being in on the joke. From the start of her career, she was met by a nascent celebrity tabloid media that called her tacky, gaudy and fake — barely concealed euphemisms for working-class. They made her name synonymous with breast implants. But nothing a columnist, critic or comic said about Parton could compare with what she said about herself. She stepped on all of their punchlines and took away their power.
When Redd Foxx aired a 1977 skit about Parton imprinting her breasts in the concrete forecourt of Mann’s Chinese Theater, she sent him a telegram requesting “two equally ample apologies.” And when the fashion critic Richard Blackwell placed Parton atop his “10 Worst-Dressed Women” list, in 1978, she replied through the press, “I thought he’d never notice.” She had a stand-up set’s worth of retorts to fascination with her breast size; “I burned my bra,” she joked, “and they had to call out the fire brigade.”
The lazy Dolly Parton jokes that permeated the culture in the 1970s and ’80s tried to frame her as a dumb blonde. Her responses were funnier, which made them genius. She used self-deprecation as a subversive trick. The jokes were beneath her, but when she played along, she wasn’t actually debasing herself. She was reclaiming her body and aesthetic as a point of pride, vaporizing any implied insult of the Appalachian working class, and revealing her critics as fools even as she graciously allowed them to laugh with her.
Soon the public narrative applied to Parton centered on her wits. The ridicule of her image allowed her to position herself as a constant revelation. “Some folks see my artificial look and think I have no depth,” she told Newsweek in 1977. “But my inner sadness and joy are as real as my hair and nails are fake. That’s what I like — looking like one thing and being another.”
In a column that same year, George F. Will called Parton one of the country’s most “visible women,” and said: “Biologically, no woman is supposed to look like that, and given the zeitgeist, no woman is supposed to want to look like that.” Will tried to position Parton as an embarrassment to both femininity and to feminism, but in fact she would come to be known as a champion of both. She was self-made in every sense. Like the office satire “9 to 5,” Parton’s film debut, she wrapped her serious message in a glittery package, which got people’s attention.
Though Parton shrugged off the “feminist” label, the feminists claimed her. In 1987, when Ms. Magazine named Parton one of its women of the year, Gloria Steinem wrote that “her flamboyant style has turned all the devalued symbols of womanliness to her own ends,” infusing them with “humor and a conscious power.”
Much of the power of Parton’s appearance was that she came by it so honestly. As one of 12 children raised in poverty in the Great Smoky Mountains, she didn’t have movie stars to emulate. She didn’t have movies. When interviewers circled around jibing questions of Parton’s “trashy” appearance, she told them that when she was a child, she would visit a nearby town, where she would see a sex worker walking in tall, translucent heels with a pile of yellow hair. People called that woman trashy, too, but to Parton, she was the image of beauty. Behind the jokes about Parton’s fake hair and fake breasts and fake nails was a sincere origin story, and an enduring loyalty to her roots. She was, beneath it all, a natural.
In the wake of Parton’s death, fans have circulated a 1977 Barbara Walters interview in which Parton defuses Walter’s line of questioning about her looks. Walters asks whether Parton is a hillbilly, asks if her breasts are real, then tells Parton: “You don’t have to look like this.”
“No, it’s certainly a choice,” Parton replies easily, going on to add, “Show business is a moneymaking joke, and I just always liked telling jokes, you know?”
Watching the clip in 2026, it’s striking how mildly Parton is styled. Her aesthetic has so influenced pop culture and digital media that it’s barely perceptible as artifice. It’s Walters who reads as false. She stiffly blames her assistant for prodding her to pose the question about Parton’s chest; she embarrasses herself by asking it. “All these years, people thought the joke was on me,” Parton told Walters. “But it’s actually been on the public.”
