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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. These stories are also known as yarns, coming from the long tradition of campfire yarns.
The canonical story concerns a shaggy talking dog. This amazing animal is much discussed and much promised, but slow to arrive. When it finally does and, miraculously, does indeed talk, someone in the story reacts with, "That dog's not so shaggy". (An alternate version involves a search for the shaggiest dog in the world.)
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.
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). Some of 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.
Examples of shaggy-dog stories
Isaac Asimov wrote one such short story, titled "Shah Guido G.". Spider Robinson sprinkles shaggy dog stories and other puns liberally throughout his Callahan series of books. Television playwright Dennis Potter wrote a 1968 play, Shaggy Dog, in which the action of the play is constantly interrupted as the lead character tells a shaggy-dog story.
Other examples of the genre include Grendel Briarton's Ferdinand Feghoot stories, and Frank Muir and Denis Norden's extemporaneous "explanations" of well-known phrases on the BBC radio panel show My Word!
The children's song "Little Bunny Foo Foo" is regarded by some to be a shaggy-dog story. The 1959 Walt Disney comedy The Shaggy Dog was billed in advertisements as "The funniest shaggy-dog story ever told", although it is not, in fact, a genuine story of this kind.
In 1999, the BBC aired a self-promoting trailer called "The Comedy Trail: A Shaggy Dog Story". It featured several famous British comedians and comic actors taking it in turns to tell a shaggy dog story, about the captain of a local cricket team who ends up recruiting a horse to become their new batsman. It was begun in his trademark armchair by Ronnie Corbett, who became famous for telling such meandering tales on The Two Ronnies.
A second shorter story, entitled "Mammals vs. Insects" and revolving around a football match between the creatures, was also shown at the beginning of 2000, featuring many of the participants from the first story.
"Weird Al" Yankovic released an eleven-minute long shaggy dog song on his 1999 album Running With Scissors, entitled "Albuquerque". The punchline was that he hated sauerkraut.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, weighing in at some 700 pages, has sometimes been described as the world's longest shaggy dog story. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a film version of a shaggy dog story, because in the end of the movie they all get arrested instead of an actual conclusion.
The recurring "Frankenstein wastes a minute of our time" sketch on Late Night with Conan O'Brien is similar in format to a shaggy dog story.
See also
External links
"Shaggy dog story"