Part 2
This is what Dolly means when she says country people and entertainers alike use comedy to get through hard times. It's not that the hard times weren't hard. It's that laughter is a way of saying, "You don't get to define this. I do."
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Steel Magnolias, Deadpool, and the Spectrum of Dark Humor
Dolly isn't alone in this. Some of the most beloved stories in film and TV use humor to cope with death, torture, and everyday indignities. In Steel Magnolias (1989, directed by Herbert Ross, 119 minutes), a group of Southern women face the death of a daughter and friend with a mix of grief and gallows humor. At the funeral, they crack jokes. At the graveside, they laugh through tears. The film understands that humor isn't the opposite of sorrow—it's a companion to it. Dolly herself wasn't in Steel Magnolias, but she could have been. That's her lineage.
Then there's Deadpool (2016, directed by Tim Miller, 108 minutes, available on Disney+). Wade Wilson is tortured, disfigured, and driven to the edge of sanity, and he jokes through all of it. The humor is crude, meta, and relentless. But it serves the same function: it's armor. It's a way of saying, "You can hurt my body, but you can't have my spirit." The difference is that Deadpool's humor is fantasy—a superhero's coping mechanism. Dolly's is real. She actually got beaten with a cane. She actually had lumps that never went down. And she still found the funny.
That's the key distinction. Fantasy heroes like Deadpool or, say, the wisecracking survivors of a horror movie can make us feel better about imaginary threats. Dolly makes us feel better about real ones. She's not offering escapism. She's offering a template.
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Like Tina Fey's 30 Rock: Finding the Funny in Everyday Indignities
If you want a closer tonal cousin, look at Tina Fey's 30 Rock (2006–2013, NBC, created by Tina Fey). The show turns the absurdities of a fictional sketch-comedy workplace into a nonstop joke machine. Characters endure sexism, corporate greed, and creative compromise, and they do it with rapid-fire wit. It's not that the indignities don't matter—it's that laughing at them is a way of surviving them.
Dolly does the same thing with her life. The restaurant scam is a 30 Rock episode waiting to happen: a stranger cons his way into a free meal, then assaults the protagonist, and the protagonist turns it into a story she tells for laughs. The difference is that 30 Rock is scripted satire. Dolly's story is memoir. She's not writing jokes for Liz Lemon. She's writing them for herself.
And that's what makes her humor so potent. It's not observational. It's not fictional. It's lived. When she says, "We made more fun of stuff that you know you shouldn't even laugh at but that was the funniest stuff," she's describing a survival strategy that she's been honing since childhood in the Smoky Mountains. She didn't learn it from a writers' room. She learned it from necessity.
So yes, you can find humor in the unlaughable. You can turn a cane-beating into a comedy bit. You can make the old man who scammed you into a character in your own story. But that's only half the equation. The other half is what you do with that humor when the next blow comes. And that's where Dolly's advice gets even more practical.
Act Like It's Raining Every Day: Humor as Armor
You’ve probably heard Dolly Parton’s advice to teenagers: “Act like it’s raining every day and wear your rubbers.” It sounds like something your grandma might say—practical, a little old-fashioned, and maybe even a bit silly. But dig deeper and you’ll find a philosophy of survival that’s as tough as it is tender. Dolly isn’t telling kids to be pessimists. She’s telling them to be prepared. Life is unpredictable, often messy, and sometimes downright cruel. So you put on your boots, you keep walking, and you smile through the storm. That’s proactive humor—a preemptive strike against adversity.
This idea isn’t new. The Stoics got there first. Seneca, the Roman philosopher and playwright, wrote about rehearsing misfortune—imagining the worst so that when it arrives, it doesn’t knock you flat. He called it praemeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils. Dolly’s version is less philosophical, more practical: put on your rubbers and keep walking. She’s not asking you to dwell on disaster; she’s asking you to be ready for it. And the readiness itself becomes a kind of armor. When you’ve already laughed at the storm, it loses some of its power.
That’s the thing about humor as armor—it doesn’t deny reality. It faces it with a wink and a shrug. Dolly’s career is full of these preemptive strikes. Take her response to being named on the worst-dressed list. Instead of getting defensive, she quipped, “I bet I’m happier than that guy that wrote that… I’m glad he came out of his closet long enough to look in mine.” It’s a masterclass in deflection. She doesn’t argue with the criticism; she reframes it. The critic is the one who’s out of touch, not her. And by making us laugh, she takes the sting out of the insult. That’s armor you can wear anywhere.
You see this same strategy in film. In The Pursuit of Happyness (2006, directed by Gabriele Muccino, 117 minutes), Chris Gardner, played by Will Smith, is homeless and fighting for a better life for his son. He doesn’t have much, but he uses humor to keep his boy’s spirits up. There’s a scene where they’re locked in a bathroom at a train station, and Chris turns it into a game, pretending the bone-density scanner is a time machine. It’s a small moment, but it’s everything. He’s not pretending they’re not homeless; he’s giving his son a way to survive the night with a smile. That’s Dolly’s rubbers in action.
