Shaggy dog story

In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded tale featuring extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents that usually results in a pointless or absurd punchline. These stories are also known as yarns, coming from the long tradition of campfire yarns.

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The canonical story is about a shaggy talking dog much discussed and much promised but slow to arrive. When the dog finally shows up and in fact talks, someone in the story says, "That dog's not so shaggy". (An alternate version of this joke involves a search for the shaggiest dog in the world.)

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Shaggy dog story has come to also mean a joke where a pun is finally achieved after a long (and ideally tedious) exposition. The humor in the punch line may be due to the sudden, unexpected recognition of a familiar saying (see the examples), since the story has nothing to do with the usual context in which the phrase is normally found, yet the listener is surprised to discover it makes sense in both situations. Therefore, if the audience is not already familiar with the phrase used in the punch line, or is not aware of the multiple meanings of the words in the phrase, the surprise ending of the joke cannot be recovered by "explaining" the joke to the audience (as demonstrated by the italicized note at the end of this article).

Related Topics:
Joke - Pun - Punch line

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A shaggy dog story may not have a pun at all; the humor (if any) is then derived 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 (an anticlimax). The following examples are in fact unusually short for this kind of shaggy dog story; many shaggy dog stories of this sort contain characteristic phrases that are repeated many times (and the joke-teller will throw them in as many times as they can get away with) but turn out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the "punchline," such as it is.

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Isaac Asimov wrote one named Shah Guido G.; Kurt Vonnegut's book Welcome to the Monkey House contains a short story entitled Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog; Spider Robinson sprinkles shaggy dog stories and other puns liberally throughout his Callahan series of books.

Related Topics:
Isaac Asimov - Kurt Vonnegut - Welcome to the Monkey House - Spider Robinson - Callahan

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