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.”

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.

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.