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)
“The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is. I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)