In case you missed it the other night, Bill Maher, the oleaginous, unctuous, supercilious, smugly self-satisfied septuagenarian sleazeball with the permanently pursed expression of a man who genuinely enjoys the smell of his own farts, who has spent decades steeping in stale dissent and the accumulated fumes of his own self-regard, stood on the Real Time stage in the middle of his own comedy show and decided that with wars raging, Donald Trump wreaking havoc and all manner of genuinely important shit happening in the world, Americans were spending entirely too much time talking about the death of Dolly Parton.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
He actually complained that “all America could really talk about” was how sad people were that we lost Dolly, ticked through some of the extraordinary displays of love appearing around the world, the Empire State Building glowing pink, the Santa Monica Ferris wheel covered in hearts, tributes stretching from London to Las Vegas, and then arrived at the Sphere and announced that it had “added a nipple.”
And that was basically it.
No tenderness. No affection. No meaningful acknowledgment of what she gave the world, what she created, what she meant to millions of people or why they might be gutted that she was gone.
Just this dry, drive-by little cheap shot tossed at a woman three days after she died, and then on to the next joke.
Fucking hilarious, Bill.
Really.
And I know exactly what some people are going to say.
Jesus Christ, Jo, don’t be so dramatic. Dolly made jokes about her tits all the time.
She sure did.
Dolly joked about her boobs, her body, her hair, her clothes, her face, her makeup and practically every visible inch of herself that some tedious man had already scrutinized, underestimated or decided was available for public inspection, because she had that magnificent ability to grab whatever cheap shit somebody intended to use against her, bedazzle the bastard, turn it inside out and make the joke hers before the other person even realized she’d stolen the weapon out of their hand.
And I guarantee you Dolly wouldn’t have cared what Bill Maher said about her on his stupid show.
She was a better person than I am by a factor of a thousand, to say the very least. She probably would’ve laughed, waved one perfectly manicured hand and gone on with her day.
I, on the other hand, am a petty, vindictive bitch who relishes any opportunity to eviscerate a sexist little hobbit with a superiority complex, so here we are.
Because it pissed me off.
And I know I’m not the only one.
The thing is, if a different comedian had made the exact same joke, I might’ve laughed.
This isn’t about the boob joke.
It’s about the fucking asshole telling it.
Context matters. History matters. And he did not materialize on that stage Friday night freshly hatched from some politically incorrect chrysalis, shiny and innocent and unburdened by decades of his own bullshit about women.
He has spent a career pawing through women’s bodies, beauty, brains, boundaries, bedrooms, breakups, beliefs and basic autonomy with the proprietary disgust of a man who thinks female existence is a defective appliance he alone has been burdened with troubleshooting, turning every woman who displeases, defies or simply declines to flatter him into another recurring exhibit in his personal Museum of Why Everybody Else Is Wrong About Everything Always.
So no, I’m not clutching my pearls because somebody joked about Dolly Parton’s fun bags.
I don’t even own fucking pearls.
I’m saying that when this particular man, dragging this particular history behind him, looks at the death of this particular woman, surveys this immense eruption of grief and gratitude, complains that she’s getting too much attention and then points at her chest, the punchline arrives with a long, greasy receipt attached.
Because Dolly was warmth and wit, humor and heart, bawdy and tender and glamorous as hell, deeply rooted in her faith, ferociously ambitious and astonishingly generous, with this uncanny gift for making people feel welcome in her presence instead of inspected by it.
The whole fucking world stopped when she died.
It stopped in pink light and porch flowers and church pews and beauty shops and bars and kitchens and parked cars where people gripped steering wheels and cried into sleeves because Dolly had been there for so long, in our kitchens and cars and childhoods, in our mothers’ record collections and our grandmothers’ living rooms, on movie screens and radios and in books arriving in little kids’ mailboxes, that somewhere along the way we stopped imagining a world in which she wouldn’t be here.
Stories poured out about mothers and grandmothers, childhoods and first dances, long drives and hospital rooms and terrible years made softer because somewhere in the middle of all that shit there was Dolly, all bouffant, brilliance, bedazzled benevolence, and boobs, cracking filthy jokes one minute and putting books into children’s hands the next, writing songs people would carry for the rest of their lives, giving away fortunes, showing up after disasters and remaining unmistakably, gloriously herself through every bit of it.
I’m still not over her passing, and I don’t honestly expect I ever will be.
Losing her felt like somebody removed one of the load-bearing beams of human tenderness, something so constant that millions of us had forgotten how much weight she was carrying until she was gone.
That grief crossed generations, politics, religions and cultures because people weren’t mourning a résumé.
They were mourning Dolly.
And watching that ocean of affection scratched something raw in two sexist birds from the same rotten feather pile.
Donald Trump tried to jam his grubby little snausage fingers into her story by posting a fake AI image of himself walking arm-in-arm with her at the White House after she died, manufacturing a moment that never happened with a woman who spent her entire career being extraordinarily careful not to let politicians claim her for themselves.
Think about how fucking grotesque that is.
Even in death, he couldn’t leave a woman’s image, boundaries or legacy alone. He had to insert himself into the frame, manufacture an intimacy she never publicly gave him and paste his own face into her history after she was no longer here to tell him to get the fuck out of it.
The man has plenty of authentic photographs and archival footage of himself hanging around Jeffrey Epstein.
But Dolly?
He needed AI.
One grasping, glory-guzzling egomaniac tried to counterfeit closeness to her.
The other tried to cheapen the mourning.
Same fucking sickness: a beloved woman dies and two swollen male egos immediately start clawing at what she left behind, desperate to wedge themselves into a story that was never about them.
And the irony of Maher complaining that everybody was devoting too much attention to Dolly while IMPORTANT THINGS were happening could choke a python.
He was delivering a monologue on a television comedy program.
This wasn’t the chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupting a briefing on troop movements because somebody wanted to discuss Dollywood. Nobody burst into the Situation Room waving a sequined butterfly and screaming that the Empire State Building had gone pink. He was standing under studio lights being paid an enormous amount of money to make jokes about current events while scolding ordinary Americans for caring too much about the death of one of the most iconic and beloved entertainers this country has ever produced.
The intellectual ouroboros here is fucking magnificent.
A snake eating its own asshole while explaining that everybody else has lost perspective.
I used to watch him a lot. Many, many years ago, I watched his show constantly because I thought he was sharp and willing to say the uncomfortable thing.
Now I can’t stand the sound of his fucking voice.
That resin-reeking, booster-bitching podcast pustule has the ineffable aura of a man who has been sitting on the same steakhouse barstool since 1997, slowly pickling himself in Maker’s Mark, stale aftershave and the sour backwash of his own bullshit while explaining to a succession of increasingly alarmed cocktail waitresses that women used to have a sense of humor.
He’s a human oil slick of smugness, scotch breath and unsolicited opinions, a pocket-sized, pontificating prick with the puckered little face of a man who’s been sucking Warheads through a cocktail straw since breakfast, carrying himself with all the swaggering, sneering self-importance of Lord Farquaad while radiating the unmistakable energy of somebody standing furious beneath the little wooden hand that says YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE THIS RIDE.
He has calcified into the ageing, pretentious pub bore he would’ve mocked thirty years ago, mistaking irritation for intelligence, contempt for sophistication and chronic obnoxiousness for some rarefied capacity to perceive truths unavailable to the rest of us slobbering civilians.
And spare me the mythology that all this sanctimonious shit makes him some fearless fucking truth-teller.
George Carlin was.
Richard Pryor was.
Joan Rivers could verbally skin somebody, salt the hide and have the poor bastard laughing while she did it.
They were adored.
Being incisive doesn’t require being insufferable. Saying something shitty that makes everybody groan doesn’t automatically turn you into Lenny Bruce because you leaned backward afterward and looked pleased with yourself.
Sometimes a prick is just a prick.
Dolly will outlive all of this.
Her songs will still be playing. Her movies will still be watched. Children will still open books because of something she started long before they were born. Families will still tell stories about her generosity, her one-liners, her ridiculous hair, the places she showed up, the people she helped and the particular way she made kindness look less like sainthood and more like common fucking sense.
Fifty years from now, people will still know Dolly Parton.
Bill Maher will be a grainy thumbnail somebody scrolls past while trying to remember why the fuck anybody ever cared what he thought.
He has spent his life acting like the smartest man in every room and still gets aggrieved whenever the spotlight lands somewhere he can’t slither underneath it.
So finally, New Rule:
Trying to diminish Dolly Parton doesn’t make you daring, dangerous or defiantly unconventional. Taking a cheap shot at a legend three days after she dies because the scale of everyone else’s grief annoys you isn’t intellectual courage. It’s just cheap, sour little cruelty dressed up in the moth-eaten costume of rebellion.
It makes you look like a bitter, brittle, boozy, blowhard little loser, marinated in misogyny, embalmed in ego and pissed off that a woman whose kindness, talent, humor and humanity dwarfed yours by several fucking zip codes received the kind of love you could spend another hundred years chasing and never catch.
Dolly Parton will be loved long after all of us are gone.
You weren’t too intellectually superior to grasp that.
You weren’t too edgy to understand why the whole world stopped for her.
You were just pissed off because you’re a small, spiteful, smug, sexist, solipsistic, sententious pseudointellectual little excuse for a man, and you know goddamn well the world will not pause, let alone stop, for one single solitary second when it comes to you.
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