Bill Maher is no stranger to an off joke. He makes a few of them in every monologue of his HBO late-night show Real Time with Bill Maher, but his wisecrack about Dolly Parton’s passing hasn’t gone down so well.
Maher opened his monologue Friday night by thanking the audience for being in a good mood.
“We did have a tough week,” he began, “Dolly Parton died, there was this terrible flooding in Nepal and I found out today that Canada has been treating me very badly.”
After addressing the ongoing Iran war and complaining that he’d have to buy a new globe to accommodate Donald Trump’s new “Lake America,” Maher came back to Dolly Parton.
“All this is going on and all America could really talk about this week was how sad it was we lost Dolly Parton,” he said.
Then Maher began to list tributes to Parton that have been on display since she passed at 80 on Tuesday.
“You see everybody around the country, even around the world—London they’re doing things. The Santa Monica ferris wheel is lit up with hearts, the Empire State Building was put up in pink,” he said.
“The sphere in Las Vegas added a nipple,” he then quipped, a reference to Parton’s famously enhanced bust.
Parton’s appearance was an oft-remarked on element of her celebrity, and over the years Parton embraced the image the world imposed upon her, making jokes of her own about it.
In response to claims she had lip-synced at Glastonbury music festival in Britain in 2014 she said: “My boobs are fake, my hair’s fake, but what is real is my voice and my heart.”
Maher was subsequently criticized for the joke.
On social media, Parton’s defenders were swift to pile on.
“Even Trump refused to be sh--ty about Dolly Parton in her passing it’s wild that Bill Maher would choose to be this much of a s--t bag about a beloved person on both sides of politics,” wrote one.
Variety called the joke the “lamest Dolly Parton tribute yet.”
But another commenter called it a “silly joke that Dolly would have laughed over.”
In 1977, she told Barbara Walters that she had given up on trying to stop people pigeonholing her because of her looks and had decided to embrace it.
“I know people make fun of me. All these years, people think the joke has been on me but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing … I make more jokes about myself than anybody,” she said.
