Everything about Shaggy Dog Story totally explained
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 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.
One such story is "The Encounter with the Horrible Monster," a shaggy dog story that's told as if it were a horror story. The story is a tale of a horrible monster (or an escaped lunatic, or an escaped prisoner, or a gorilla), that pursues a character implacably. After a lengthy exposition describing the pursuit, during which the audience's expectations of a horrendous climax are built up, the monster eventually corners his victim, at which point he touches him saying "
Tag! You're it!"
Shaggy dog story has come to also mean a
joke where a
pun is finally achieved after a long (and ideally tedious) exposition. This is also called a
feghoot. The humor in the
punch line may be due to the sudden, unexpected recognition of a familiar saying, 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 isn't already familiar with the phrase used in the punch line, or isn't aware of the multiple meanings of the words in the phrase, the surprise ending of the joke can't be recovered by explaining the joke to the audience.
An example of this type is
The Rarie, in which a cute pet grows so large (described in many stages) that its owner can't keep it. He loads the Rarie onto a lorry and drives to a cliff, and is about to tip the animal over the brink when it looks out and says "hey, that's a long way to tip a Rarie"...
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).
One joke of this type is "The Purple Flower." In this joke, with much detail and narration, a young boy is expelled from his elementary school and abandoned by his parents because he called a girl a "purple flower." He eventually hears of an old woman who can tell him why the term is so offensive; as he goes to find her, he sees her across the street and runs towards her, getting hit by the bus and dying as he crosses the street. The audience is then told that the moral of the story is that you should look both ways before you cross the street.
A more ribald or scatological version is The Aristocrats.
Isaac Asimov, whose specialties included both science fiction and humor, wrote a short story called "Shah Guido G.," referring to the story's Atlantean ruler. The story ends on an anticlimax, and when a reader protested that it was "nothing but a shaggy dog story," Asimov pointed out that the title "Shah Guido G." could also be read as "Shahgui [for exampleshaggy] Dog," indicating this had been his intention.
The archetypical shaggy dog story
The commonly believed
archetype of the shaggy dog story is a story that concerns a shaggy dog. The story builds up, repeatedly emphasizing how amazing the dog is. At the climax of the story, someone in the story reacts with, "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, that the story will end with a punchline, are thus disappointed. Cohen gives the following example of this story:
Further Information
Get more info on 'Shaggy Dog Story'.
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