In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded tale featuring extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents, usually resulting in a pointless or absurd punchline based on a play on words in cliché form. These stories are a special case of yarns, coming from the long tradition of campfire yarns. Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of the art of joke telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. A lengthy shaggy dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the story ends with a meaningless anticlimax.
Read more about Shaggy Dog Story: The Archetypical Shaggy Dog Story, Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words shaggy dog, shaggy, dog and/or story:
“Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are “shaggy dog” stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.”
—George Barker (b. 1913)
“Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)