Shaggy dog story
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- This article is about the joke. For the television program of the same name, see Shaggy Dog Story (TV).
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).
A similar construct is the famous joke about the Purple Wombat, also encountered as the joke about the Purple Flower and the Purple Gorilla.
A more ribald or scatological version is The Aristocrats (joke).
