Tablesorter creation fails when called on empty table

Calling tablesorter on the following table fails:
<table class="tablesorter" id="emptytable">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>header</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
</tbody>
</table>
It fails at jquery.tablesorter.js (2.0.1) line 482 with the error:
'parsers has no properties'. I can bypass the error by adding a dummy
row in the tbody and using display:none.