Shaggy dog story
In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.
This article is about the joke. For the television program, see Shaggy Dog Story (TV).
Shaggy-dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions 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.[1] 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 long-awaited resolution is essentially meaningless, with the joke as a whole playing upon humans' search for meaning.[2][3] The nature of their delivery is reflected in the English idiom spin a yarn, by way of analogy with the production of yarn.
As a comic device, the shaggy-dog story is related to unintentional long windedness, and the two are sometimes both referred to in the same way. While a shaggy-dog story is a comic exaggeration of the real life experience, it is also deliberately constructed to play off an audience who are expecting a comedic payoff and uses that expectation to subvert expectations and create comedy in unexpected ways.
's antiwar "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a shaggy-dog story about the military draft, hippies, and improper disposal of garbage.[9]
Arlo Guthrie
's version of "Bullfrog Blues" (on How Late'll Ya Play 'Til?) is a rambling shaggy-dog story performed as a talking blues song.[10]
David Bromberg
's "Albuquerque", the final track on his 1999 album Running with Scissors, is an over-eleven-minute digression from one of the first topics mentioned in the song, the narrator-protagonist's longstanding dislike of sauerkraut.[11]
"Weird Al" Yankovic
's "No Anchovies, Please" on their 1980 album Love Stinks, is a shaggy-dog story that tells the tale of an American housewife who meets an unfortunate fate after opening a can of anchovies.[12]
The J. Geils Band
one of the pen-names of Flann O'Brien, was a master of long shaggy-dog stories, most commonly in his '''Various Lives of Keats and Chapman''' stories in his Irish Times column the ''Cruisceann Lawn''. Almost all the stories would have meandering, painful, often esoteric detail, leading to a meaningless ending to justify a dreadful yet amusing pun or spoonerism, the more excruciating the better. Indeed the name and characters of the column, based on the poets Keats and Chapman derive from the first such story where John Keats, in addition to his poetical gifts, is somehow reckoned an expert vet, to whom a prize homing pigeon belonging to George Chapman is brought, choking. Keats opens the bird's beak widely, stares down for some seconds, deftly removes a piece of stuck champagne cork from the bird's throat, and health is restored to Chapman's animal. Upon which happy event, Keats is moved to write his epic poem : "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (homer being slang for Homing pigeon, as well as the name of the great Greek poet for whom Keats' poem was actually written).[13][14]
Myles-na-gCopaleen
In the film , Sheriff John Hoxley (played by W.C. Fields) explains how he came to be known as Honest John. The story itself is short for a shaggy-dog story, but it is padded by Fields's drunken and unsuccessful attempts to make a simple shot at pool. In the end, it turns out that the reason for the nickname is that he once returned a glass eye to its owner, who had left it behind.[15]
Six of a Kind
In , the character Grampa Simpson frequently tells nonsensical shaggy-dog stories, often to the annoyance of other characters. In the season 4 episode "Last Exit to Springfield", Grampa tells Mr. Burns that he uses "stories that don't go anywhere" as a strike-breaking technique before launching into a rambling tale.[17]
The Simpsons
In the novel by Thomas Pynchon, the main character Benny Profane recalls a shaggy-dog story about a boy who is born with a golden screw in his belly button, the only purpose of which turns out to be to hold the boy's bottom in place.[18]
V.
called The Illuminatus! Trilogy "The longest shaggy-dog joke in literary history..."[19]
Rolling Stone
In a campfire story called "You're not a monk", a storyteller tells a 10-minute long story about a man who goes through a long series of trials to become a monk in hopes of gaining permission to learn a mysterious secret, and at the end, the storyteller refuses to tell the audience what the secret is because "you aren't a monk."[20]
Boy Scouts of America
The Big Lebowski
The joke is a modern take on the Shaggy Dog story. The joke has a general framework featuring a male anthropomorpic Cheerio (sometimes specified to be a Honey Nut Cheerio) that attends high school and falls in love with a female Cheerio, with the two going to prom and the protagonist sent to queue for the punch bowl, only to be told there's "no punch line." The story can be elaborated on in many ways to extend the joke's length, such as the minutia of the Cheerio's family life, to pointless details about his relationship, or even an internal monologue as he waits for the non-existent punch line to die down. Similarly to The Aristocrats, the joke's humour moreso derives from the absurdity of detail given to the middle section of the joke.
Cheerio
Anti-humor
The Aristocrats
Chekhov's gun
Feghoot
Information overload
No soap radio
Rakugo
Red herring
Shaggy dog (disambiguation)
Shaggy God story
(January–March 1963). "A Classification for Shaggy Dog Stories". The Journal of American Folklore. 76 (299). American Folklore Society: 42–68. doi:10.2307/538078. JSTOR 538078.
Jan Harold Brunvand
Asimov, Isaac (1991). . Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor: A Lifetime Collection of Favorite Jokes, Anecdotes, and... Houghton Mifflin Books. pp. 49–67. ISBN 0-395-57226-6.
"Shaggy Dog"
(1953). The 'Shaggy Dog' Story: Its Origin, Development and Nature (with a few seemly examples). C.H. Drummond (illustrator). London: Faber & Faber.
Partridge, Eric
Francis Lee Utley and Dudley Flamm (1969). "The Urban and the Rural Jest (With an Excursus on the Shaggy Dog)". Journal of Popular Culture. 2 (4): 563–577. :10.1111/j.0022-3840.1969.0204_563.x.