Dolly Parton Ripped a Country Artist Over a Joke About Her Breasts
Dolly Parton often cracks jokes about her breasts, but that doesn’t mean she likes hearing them from other people. While she was touring with Merle Haggard and other artists, a country singer made a quip about the size of her chest. She immediately made it clear that she didn’t want to hear it.
Dolly Parton wasn’t amused by a joke made about her breasts
Haggard said one of the artists he respected most was Roy Nichols. The country guitarist impressed him endlessly. Still, he thought Nichols once pushed boundaries in an interaction with Parton.
“He is a gentleman,” Haggard wrote in his book My House of Memories: For the Record. “Yet when Dolly Parton got on my bus once, he asked her if she was ill.”
Confused, Parton asked what he meant.
“Because of that swelling in your chest.”
“Would your mama be proud of you?” she snapped back.
Haggard completely understood why Parton found the joke frustrating. While she often makes jokes at her own expense, she likely doesn’t want to constantly hear them from other people.
“Roy shouldn’t have said that,” Haggard wrote. “It was rude. Dolly grew weary of breast jokes many years ago, I’m sure.”
She knew how to put men in their places
Parton has a flirtatious personality, but those who know her well said she doesn’t like it when men get overly familiar with her.
“I’ve never seen a man get physical with her, but I’ve seen men get very suggestive after one too many drinks,” her guitarist Tom Rutledge said in the book Dolly: The Biography by Alanna Nash. “I know it really, really tees her off, but you’d never know it until afterwards, when she says, ‘That son of a b****.’”
She quickly developed a method for shutting this kind of interaction down.
“But she handles it well,” Rutledge said. “She’ll put him down to where he’ll lose his passion pretty quick. She’s good at making her feelings known to someone.”
Dolly Parton often makes jokes about her breasts
Though Parton didn’t like Nichols’ joke, she doesn’t have a problem with poking fun at herself. In a 2004 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she joked about the danger of someone like her having a wardrobe malfunction.
“You had a hilarious line the other day when you said that there’s not gonna be a wardrobe malfunction with you because —” DeGeneres said.
“Oh, I said because I’ll probably take out the first three rows,” Parton said. “But I can tell you this: If there is a malfunction, you will not see a nipple ring. It’ll be more like a hula hoop. There’s a lot of strain on my little clothes.”
She has also joked about naming her breasts “Shock” and “Awe.” It could be that Parton doesn’t like jokes about herself because she always has a better one up her sleeve.
