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)
““And how do you know that you’re mad?”
“To begin with,” the Cat said, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”
“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The child ... stands upon a place apart, a little spectator of the world, before whom men and women come and go, events fall out, years open their slow story and are noted or let go as his mood chances to serve them. The play touches him not. He but looks on, thinks his own thought, and turns away, not even expecting his cue to enter the plot and speak. He waits,—he knows not for what.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)