Shaggy dog story

This article is about the joke. For the television program, see Shaggy Dog Story (TV).

Shaggy-dog story
Features	Extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax

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. In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending. ^[1]

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. ^[2] 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 people's search for meaning. ^{[3] [4]} 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. In such kind of humorous story, the humor lies in the pointlessness or irrelevance of the plot or punch line. ^[5]

Humanities scholar Jane Marie Todd observed that the shaggy-dog story demonstrates the nature of desiring humor and how that process occurs. ^[4]

Archetypal story

The eponymous shaggy dog story serves as the archetype of the genre. The story builds up a repeated emphasizing of the dog's exceptional shagginess. The climax of the story culminates in a character reacting to the animal by stating: "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, both in the details (that the dog is shaggy) and in the delivery of a punchline, are thus subverted. Ted Cohen gives the following example of this story:

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 that shaggy." ^[2]

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." ^{[6] [7]}

Examples in literature

Isaac Asimov and the story of the Shah Guido G.

In the collection of stories by Isaac Asimov titled Buy Jupiter and Other Stories is a story titled "Shah Guido G." ^[8] In his background notes, Asimov identifies the tale as a shaggy-dog story, and explains that the title is a play on "shaggy dog".

Examples in music

• Arlo Guthrie's antiwar "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a shaggy-dog story about the military draft, hippies, and improper disposal of garbage. ^[9]
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Albuquerque," the final track on his 1999 album Running with Scissors , is an over-11-minute digression from one of the first topics mentioned in the song, the narrator-protagonist's longstanding dislike of sauerkraut. ^[10]
• The J. Geils Band'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. ^[11]

Jim Steinman recorded "Love, Death and an American Guitar" on the album Bad for Good, the followup to Bat Out of Hell. In this spoken-word piece, a young man goes on a rampage with his Fender guitar, finally creeping into his parents' bedroom. Just as he is about to bring the guitar crashing down onto the bed, his father wakes to remonstrate with him about what he's doing to "an expensive musical instrument". The young man replies "... you got a helluva lot to learn about rock and roll!"

Other examples

• Myles-na-gCopaleen, 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 pigeon. Upon which happy event, Keats is moved to write his famous sonnet, "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). ^{[12] [13]}
• In The Simpsons , 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. ^[14]
• In the novel V. 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. ^[15]
• In a Boy Scouts of America 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." ^[16]
• Comedian Norm Macdonald told multiple famous shaggy-dog stories, mostly during appearances on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien and his later talk show Conan, that went viral after Macdonalds death. ^{[17] [18] [19]} In 2010, after unexpectedly being asked to appear for a second seven-minute segment on The Tonight Show, having only prepared material for one, Macdonald told the "Moth joke". ^{[20] [21] [22]} Improvising, he expanded a 20-second Colin Quinn joke about moths being attracted to light into a kafkaesque that has been compared to the storytelling of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov. ^{[23] [18] [24]} During a May 2014 Conan appearance, Macdonald told a 3-minute joke about "Jaques De Gatineau" culminating in a pun, which sidekick Andy Richter described as "like taking somebody on a four-mile hike to show you a dog turd". ^[25] In 2016 The Howard Stern Show, Macdonald told the 9-minute long "Dirty Johnny" joke. ^{[26] [27]}

See also

• Anti-humor
• The Aristocrats
• Chekhov's gun
• Feghoot
• Information overload
• No soap radio
• Rakugo
• Red herring
• Shaggy dog (disambiguation)
• Shaggy God story

References

1. "shaggy-dog story Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary". Archived from the original on 11 September 2015. Retrieved 5 January 2025.
2. Cohen, Ted (1999). Jokes. University of Chicago Press. p. 8. ISBN   0-226-11230-6.
3. Jovial Bob Stine (1978). How to be funny: an extremely silly guidebook. Dutton. ISBN   0-525-32410-0.
4. Todd, Jane Marie (1992). "Balzac's Shaggy Dog Story" . Comparative Literature. 44 (3): 268–279. doi:10.2307/1770857. ISSN   0010-4124. JSTOR   1770857.
5. "Definition of SHAGGY-DOG".
6. Feinberg, Leonard (1978). Secret of Humor. Rodopi. pp. 181–182. ISBN   90-6203-370-9.
7. Quinion, Michael (19 June 1999). "Shaggy Dog Story". World Wide Words.
8. Asimov, Isaac (1975). Buy Jupiter and other stories. New York, NY: Fawcett Crest. pp. 33–44.
9. Berman, Eric. "Song Of The Day – "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" by Arlo Guthrie | Booth Reviews". Chicagonow.com. Archived from the original on 18 May 2014. Retrieved 2 June 2014.
10. Howell, Dave (28 January 2000). "Spotlight on "Weird Al" Yankovic He May Look More Normal, But Parodist is Still an Oddball at Heart". The Morning Call.
11. jb (13 May 2006). "Still Another Great Moment in the History of Background Music". The Hits Just Keep On Comin'. Retrieved 31 May 2022.
12. THE VARIOUS LIVES OF KEATS AND CHAPMAN (AND … | Kirkus Reviews.
13. O'Neill, Jamie (22 November 2003). "Whims and shams, puns and flams". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 29 March 2023.
14. "Simpson Crazy, the ultimate Simpsons fan site — in association with Krusty Krowd Kontrol Barriers".
15. Pynchon, Thomas (18 March 1963). V. J. B. Lippincott. ISBN   9780397003013.
16. "You're Not a Monk Joke".
17. Ilyas, Kashif. "Norm Macdonald, the Moth and Dostoevsky: Watching the former 'Saturday Night Live' comic was an experience". The Punch Magazine. Retrieved 23 May 2025.
18. Balsamo, Dylan. "Norm MacDonald's Moth Joke Encapsulated the Mind of a Genius". The Fordham Ram. Retrieved 23 May 2025.
19. Canfield, Kevin (20 September 2016). "For Norm Macdonald, facts are just starting points for comedy". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 23 May 2025.
20. I'm not Norm (16 September 2021). Conan Tells the Story Behind Norm Macdonald's Moth Joke . Retrieved 23 May 2025– via YouTube.
21. "Here's the Amazing Truth Behind Norm Macdonald's 'Moth Goes Into a Podiatrist's Office' Joke". Inc.com. Archived from the original on 18 August 2022. Retrieved 23 May 2025.
22. StandUpy PoPolskuPowróciły (15 March 2017). Norm McDonald - Moth Joke [napisy PL] . Retrieved 23 May 2025– via YouTube.
23. Rowles, Dustin (17 September 2021). "Conan O'Brien Discusses the Improvised Origins of Norm Macdonald's 'The Moth' Joke". Pajiba. Retrieved 23 May 2025.
24. Happy the Dog (26 March 2019). Norm Macdonald - The Story Behind the Moth Joke . Retrieved 23 May 2025– via YouTube.
25. Norm Macdonald Tells The Most Convoluted Joke Ever - CONAN on TBS. 30 April 2021. Retrieved 23 May 2025– via YouTube.
26. The Howard Stern Show (14 September 2022). Norm Macdonald Tells His 7-Minute “Dirty Johnny” Joke (2016) . Retrieved 23 May 2025– via YouTube.
27. "What to Think About Jokes Told by Norm MacDonald". What to Think About Art. 29 June 2019. Retrieved 23 May 2025.

Further reading

• Asimov, Isaac (1991). "Shaggy Dog" . Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor: A Lifetime Collection of Favorite Jokes, Anecdotes, and Limericks with Copious Notes on How to Tell Them and Why. Houghton Mifflin Books. pp.  49–67. ISBN   0-395-57226-6.
• Jan Harold Brunvand (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.
• Partridge, Eric (1931). "The Shaggy Dog Story". New Statesman . Statesman Pub. Co. p. 534.
• Partridge, Eric (1953). The 'Shaggy Dog' Story: Its Origin, Development and Nature (with a few seemly examples). Illustrated by C. H. Drummond. London: Faber & Faber.
• 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. doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1969.0204_563.x.