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Shaggy dog story
This article is about the joke. For the television program of the same name, see Shaggy Dog Story (TV). For other uses, see Shaggy dog (disambiguation).
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 or a pointless punchline.

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 end resolution is essentially meaningless.[2] The nature of their delivery is reflected in the English idiom spin a yarn, by way of analogy with the production of yarn.

Archetypal story Edit

A shaggy dog, the archetypical subject of long-winded, pointless stories
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 that 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."[3][4]

Examples in literature Edit

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 he is properly drunk, and ask him to tell "the stirring story about his grandfather's old ram".[5] Twain, encouraged by his friends who have already heard the story, finally finds Blaine, an old silver miner, who 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."

Buy Jupiter and Other Stories, a collection of stories by Isaac Asimov, contains a tale whose title is "Shah Guido G."[6] In his background notes, Asimov defines the tale as a shaggy dog story, and explains that the title is a play on "shaggy dog".

Examples in music Edit

Arlo Guthrie's classic anti-war story-song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a shaggy dog story about the military draft, hippies, and improper disposal of garbage.[7]
David Bromberg's version of "Bullfrog Blues" (on "How Late'll Ya Play 'Til?") is a rambling shaggy dog story performed as a talking blues song.[8][9]
"Weird Al" Yankovic's "Albuquerque," the final track on his 1999 album Running with Scissors, is an over-twelve-minute digression from one of the first topics mentioned in the song, the narrator-protagonist's longstanding dislike of sauerkraut.
See also Edit

Anti-humor
The Aristocrats
Chekhov's gun
Feghoot
Information overload
No soap radio
Red herring
Shaggy God story
References

Further reading

Last edited 6 days ago by Staszek Lem
RELATED ARTICLES
Shah Guido G.
short story by Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor
Anti-humor
style of comedy that is deliberately awkward or experimental
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"the Aristocrats" is pretty close, but it has a punchline!

Eric, the Buddy Lester hat thing is way too action-packed and breathlessly funny to qualify!

the Godot thing is straightup Laurel & Hardy as Sam himself wd admit

given how manic a lot of ILX is about Lynch I'm surprised that there's been no reference (to my knowledge) about this new biography/memoir "Room to Dream". I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a wider cultural spasm about it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Room-Dream-David-Lynch/dp/1782118381

I looked at it in the bookshop today and it seems to have a biographical chapter/ memoirial chapter alternating structure.

personally, I don't know if there's anything in this book that I'm not already tired of or that hasn't been hashed out in multiple video extras/ interviews tv and print/lynch on lynch's etc.

i am surprised at how under-the-radar it is.

actually, it seems to have been released/published today but i'm still surprised.

I may check it out, but Lynch has a certain number of stories he tells over and over again.

i've thumbed through books of his in stores before and i've never been that impressed with the way he writes. i do find his life interesting, and have a few other bios on my shelf, but i kind of prefer to have his stories filtered through other people's writing voices

stories he tells over and over again.

he seems to be something of an the obsessive, so this fits.

I read a review. He's someone I don't particularly find compelling in terms of life story/art dynamic. Maybe someone will write a good bio 20-30 years from now.

My wife gave me a copy Tuesday as a late Father's Day present. I'm about 240 pages in and enjoying it. I really like the structure -- alternating sections of well-researched biography by Kristine McKenna with sections by Lynch reacting to, embellishing and occasionally rebutting the previous section. Loads of anecdotes that are new to me.

I wasn't aware of the bio until a friend told me he got it a couple days ago. Lack of publicity and enthusiasm is surprising. I just ordered a copy, that sorta structure sounds really enjoyable.

lol it's like how many people bought The Final Dossier and don't know about this

Ahh, I didn't understand that the bio part was not written by Lynch. That actually makes me more interested.

Same here

It’s kind of interesting - I’m not sure I’ve seen a similar bio structure?

I got the audiobook - I’d be interested to see what the print version looks like cause lynch’s sections seem pretty off-the-cuff a lot of the time, full of ad-libs, saying something & then correcting himself and so on. I’d guess they use a cleaned-up transcript of these in the physical book.

It’s entertaining, like WilliamC said there’s a decent amount of new stuff along with stuff you’ve heard a million times (he prefaces a couple of things with “I’ve told this story so many times”). The lynch sections get more scant the closer we get to present day, as you might expect, so it’s up to the McKenna sections to provide the detail.

There isn’t much in the way of “rebuttal”; the wives, girlfriends and children will say some pretty revealing stuff about his personal life in each chapter and Lynch won’t address any of it and just tells a couple of stories.

But yeah I enjoyed the audiobook as a kind of companion to the art life film (which btw anyone who’s seen that might be interested to know that we get the end of the “Mr Smith” anecdote in this book) and he also has a kind of quasi Dr Amp outburst at one point

i just want to know if he ever popped the cow (the one stranded on a ski trail in idaho)

He's someone I don't particularly find compelling in terms of life story/art dynamic.

Yeah the details of both his upbringing and his professional life seem pretty banal. Grew up squaresville but has always been a weirdo, has spent the last 50 years or so obsessed with making art. Some personal drama here and there, plus the Woody Woodpeckers, but he's definitely someone where everything interesting in the work itself.

...is in the work itself.

Lynch gave up toxic anger 20-30 years ago for meditation. Couldn’t give up smokes tho lol so yeah. Yeah

Lack of publicity and enthusiasm is surprising.

An interview piece in the Guardian today on the back of the book. I really like that main b/w portrait photograph of him. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/23/david-lynch-gotta-be-selfish-twin-peaks

Lack of publicity and enthusiasm is surprising

i don't think it's necessary if you enjoy an artist to have to consume every single thing they do. i like Lynch for his movies. not gonna buy all his books or t-shirts.

also last year i devoted an insane amount of time and thought to 18 hours worth of new Lynch. not just the shows but the behind the scenes, the book, some podcasts, etc. his shit is so real, it's emotionally and mentally draining. can't blame anyone for wanting to take a break.

xp the back of the book presumably has more content tbh

You wait until they interview him about the copyright page!

his short movie on the chapter headings gave me nightmares so I'll pass i think

In his 40 years of film-making, the director has taken audiences from sunlit American idylls to surreal dimensions populated by demons, doppelgangers and psychotic killers. His are scenes you can’t forget: the whimpering, deformed baby in Eraserhead, the severed ear in Blue Velvet, the blood-spattered, skull-crushing violence of Wild At Heart, the nuclear explosion in Twin Peaks: The Return. Google “David Lynch creepy”, and you get 5.5m results.

sigh, pet peeve but if you google "david lynch creepy", in quotes, you get 3,030 results. if you google the same thing without quotes you get over 9.5 million results. if you google David Lynch Hot Dogs, you get more than 11 million results (if you google "David Lynch hot dogs", you get 3 results)

He does, however, squash the theory, much loved by some Peakers, that the last two parts of the 18-hour series should be watched simultaneously on two screens, with dialogue overlapping. “Yeah, I heard that. It’s bullshit. See, it’s beautiful that someone came up with this. You could double-expose scenes in lots of films and it could conjure some fantastic thing.”

sad lol

Lol I’d forgotten about that “theory”

His quote on trump from that interview is so dumb, he really should stay as tight-lipped on politics as he is on the meaning of his films

Its true that Donald Trump could be the greatest president ever if he was not Donald Trump

well its a function of arts graduates insisting that artists have something valid to say about politics etc isnt it they then ask great artists this as if it were going to lead anywhere but where it usually does

Nah I don’t think the interviewer that goes looking for a lynch quote on politics in 2018 is under any illusions, ppl know the kind of thing they’re gonna get

true true

twas a remarkably poor piece all told

He is undecided about Donald Trump. “He could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.”

...what

you see em doin so?

It’s been funny watching people online today try and claim he’s the victim of clickbait w the Trump quote instead of dealing w the reality that great artists can have bad politics. Or it seems like he doesn’t follow politics closely at all. Like if it doesn’t effect him, he doesn’t care.

Who gives a shit

Or it seems like he doesn’t follow politics closely at all. Like if it doesn’t effect him, he doesn’t care.

Yep

Who gives a shit

otm

how out of character that David Lynch, so famously engaged with the world outside his own studio, would have one slight blip in his analysis of geopolitics

didn’t he love reagan

he’s like a kid watching bugs through a magnifyimg glass, it’s just bc ppl are reacting to trump that he even notices

“they’re swarmimg maybe they will eat the leader” etc

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed obsessing over the small print of celebrity interviews

yes next to the guy that finally wiped out the Cherokee and the other guy who nuked Japan and another guy who raped his slave and is on our $20 bill yes he could end up being the greatest among that esteemed crowd

No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.

otmfmfmfm

what am i missing? the only way to respond to trump is more intelligently than trump

1964: College student David Lynch gets stoned at a Bob Dylan concert and walks out of the show. His roommate, Peter, gets angry about this, so Lynch throws him out. (Peter would later become J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf.) pic.twitter.com/xaikQHOYSK

— Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel) June 24, 2018