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.[1]
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The commonly believed archetype of the shaggy dog story is a story that concerns a shaggy dog. The story builds up, repeatedly emphasizing how shaggy 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. Ted Cohen gives the following example of this story:[1]
| “ | A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions. The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not so shaggy." | ” |
However, authorities disagree as to whether this particular story is the archetype after which the category is named. Eric Partridge, for example, provides a very different story, as do William and Mary Morris in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.
According to Partridge and the Morrises, the archetypical shaggy dog story involves an advertisement placed in The Times announcing a search for a shaggy dog. In the Partridge story, an aristocratic family living in Park Lane is searching for a lost dog, and an American answers the advertisement with a shaggy dog that he has found and personally brought across the Atlantic, only to be received by the butler at the end of the story who takes one look at the dog and shuts the door in his face saying "But not so shaggy as that, sir!" In the Morris story, the advertiser is organizing a competition to find the shaggiest dog in the world, and after a lengthy exposition of the search for such a dog a winner is presented to the aristocratic instigator of the competition, who says "I don't think he's so shaggy."[2][3]
A typical shaggy dog story occurs in Mark Twain's book about his travels west, Roughing It. Twain's friends encourage him to go find a man called Jim Blaine when Blaine is properly drunk, and get Blaine to tell "the stirring story about his grandfather's old ram" (Chapter 53). Twain, encouraged by his friends who've already heard the story, finally finds the man in his cups to the proper degree, and Blaine, an old silver miner, sets out to tell Twain and his friends the tale. Blaine starts out with the ram ("There never was a bullier old ram than what he was"), and goes on for four more mostly dull but occasionally hilarious unparagraphed pages. Along the way, Blaine tells many stories, each of which connects back to the one before by some tenuous thread, and none of which has to do with the old ram. Among these stories are: a tale of boiled missionaries; of a lady who borrows a false eye, a peg leg, and the wig of a coffin-salesman's wife; and a final tale of a man who gets caught in machinery at a carpet factory and whose "widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in..." As Blaine tells the story of the carpet man's funeral, he begins to fall asleep, and Twain, looking around, sees his friends "suffocating with suppressed laughter." They now inform him that "at a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep [Blaine] from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram — and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had heard him get, concerning it."
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.[4]
An example of this type of joke is "The Purple Box", "The Purple Doughnut", "Purple Spaghetti" or "The Purple Passion". In this joke, with much detail and narration, a young boy overhears a group of older kids talking about a "purple box/doughnut/spaghetti/passion". When the boy asks the kids what a "purple box" is, they beat him up. The story continues with the boy meeting other people (teacher, school principal, parents) throughout the day; they each ask what happened to him, causing him to repeat his entire story which always ends with the question: "What's a purple box?" Each time, the person questioned takes great offense and punishes the boy; the teacher sends him to the principal, the principal expels him, and so on. Later, he runs across the street and gets hit by a bus. The audience is then told that the moral of the story is that you should look both ways before you cross the street.
Another example takes the form of a mathematics puzzle. In general, the story begins "See if you can answer this puzzle, you are the driver of a bus that picks up x people at its first stop". The story continues with the person assuming that they must keep track of the number of people on the bus to answer the question. So then the story goes, "At the second stop, y people get off and z people get on. How many people are on the bus now?". With every stop the bus makes in the story, the other person must add the number of people that get on and subtract the amount of people that get off to find the remaining total on the bus. The calculations usually become more difficult as the journey progresses, for example, "At its eighth stop, 25 people get off and 37 get on". At the end of the bus journey the other person is finally asked something unrelated to the calculations, such as "Now, what is the color of the bus driver's socks?", making the entire puzzle meaningless and a humorous waste of the other person's time. Having expended much effort in calculating the number of people on the bus, the person concerned often forgets that he or she is the bus driver, so that the answer to the last question would be the color of the socks of the person hearing the joke.
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 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.
An example of this type is Ed Foster's "Chicago 'L'" story. It begins with a passenger boarding a train at Jackson to find that the driver is inebriated. It continues with a stop-by-stop description of the conductor's ineptness at each of the intervening stops. To hold the listener's attention, the description at each stop is different from all the others. Finally at Howard, the terminus, the driver opens the doors on the side without a platform. The disgusted riders open the correct doors and disembark. The driver, however, disembarks through the wrong doors and falls across the "third rail", but he is not electrocuted because he was such a "poor conductor".
Another example is "The Rarie", in which an imaginary, exotic animal known as a Rarie is bought by someone as a cute pet, but progressively grows so large (described in many stages) that its owner cannot keep it. The person finally decides to get rid of the creature, loads the Rarie onto a lorry and drives to a high cliff; they are about to tip the animal over the brink when the Rarie looks over the edge and says, rather forlornly, "Hey, it's a long way to tip a Rarie"...
This type of story was a major feature of the radio program My Word!, with a contest between Denis Norden and Frank Muir to see whose story was the most outrageous ending to each show.
Another variation is used to play on the emotions of the audience. The teller of the joke puts on a slow, scary but also concerned tone of voice and tells a drawn-out story of a simple, non-scary event to build tension and make the other person feel sympathetic for teller of the joke. An example of this type of joke would go:
"So I was just walking down the street, like normal... I was feeling generally... normal... and then, well... I heard something... so, I decided to check it out... and then... I saw something... it was big, and I didn't know what to make of it... so I got closer to it... closer, closer... and then, I suddenly noticed what it was... it was... a dog... this dog, right there on the street... right in front of me... (then, the joke teller suddenly smiles sweetly and says, in a cheerful voice) "...and it went woof-woof-woof! It was SO cute!" [5]
"The Aristocrats" consists of a description of a potential theater act whose content gradually becomes more obscene as the act progresses, leading to a punch line asking what such an act would be called. The joke-teller announces, anti-climactically, that the act is called The Aristocrats.[6]
Isaac Asimov, whose specialties included both science fiction and humor and who was a self-described "punster", wrote a short story called "Shah Guido G.", referring to the story's Atlantean ruler. As expected, the story ends on an anticlimax.