shaggy dog story
phrase

- a long, rambling story or anecdote that builds up audience expectation and then deliberately delivers a weak, anticlimactic, or irrelevant punchline. The humour — if any — lies in the pointlessness itself.

- any long-winded account of events — in journalism, film criticism, or everyday speech — that meanders through detail and digression without arriving at a satisfying conclusion.

- a plot structure characterised by extensive build-up, digression, and a deliberately unsatisfying or ironic resolution that subverts the audience's expectations of a proper ending.

Merriam-Webster, Oxford English Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary

—
PHRASE ORIGIN

The phrase traces back to a specific joke — or rather, an anti-joke — that circulated in print from at least 1906.

The earliest documented version appeared in The Cincinnati Post in January 1906. A man named P.J. Faulkner told a group of friends a story about a character who wanted a "shaggy dog." The story wound on at length and ended with absolutely nothing happening. His companions were not amused. They were baffled and annoyed — which was, apparently, the point.

By 1908, a more polished version was circulating in New York newspapers: a man walks from Brooklyn to Harlem to sell his shaggy dog to an advertiser, only to be told at the door: "Not shaggy enough." The long journey — and the reader's long patience — yield precisely nothing.

The phrase shaggy dog story entered common usage in British and American English from the 1940s onward, helped by Eric Partridge's documentation of it in his dictionaries of slang and idiom. The adjective shaggy — from Old English sceacga, meaning a rough mass of hair — had long been associated with untidiness and lack of polish. A shaggy story was, by extension, one that had not been neatly trimmed to a point.

Over time the phrase broadened beyond joke-telling to describe any narrative — a film, a novel, a rambling anecdote at a dinner table — that keeps you waiting for a resolution that never properly arrives.

Helga & Paul Smith

—
SYNONYMS

circular (cock-and-bull story/yarn), damp squib, dead-end story, drawn-out digression (anecdote), dud punchline, false build-up, Grandpa Simpson story, groaner, laboured joke, long-winded yarn, meandering narrative (tale), non-story, no-payoff joke, overlong anecdote (diversion), pointless punchline (tale), protracted non-starter, rambling anecdote (yarn), red herring, rigmarole, SHAGGY DOG STORY, shaggy yarn, slow-burn joke, story without a point, tale that loses the thread, tortuous/waffling account, wind-up joke, windbag's tale, yarn that goes nowhere, all build-up and no payoff, anticlimactic joke (tale), endless anecdote, beating about the bush, going around the houses (the long way round), leading someone up the garden path, much ado about nothing, stringing someone along

—
SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“I can laugh at many things, but SHAGGY DOG STORIES are not my kind of humour.”

—
PLEASE SUPPORT US

On evenings and weekends, I research and write your daily OWAD newsletter together with Helga (my lovely wife and business partner) and our eagle-eyed daughter Jennifer. It remains FREE, AD-FREE, and ALIVE thanks to voluntary donations from appreciative readers.

If you aren’t already, please consider supporting us — even a small donation, equivalent to just 1-cup-of-coffee a month, would help us in covering expenses for mailing, site-hosting, maintenance, and service.

Just head over to DonorBox:
https://donorbox.org/owad-q4-2023-5

or

Bank transfer:
Paul Smith
IBAN: DE75 7316 0000 0002 5477 40

Important: please state as ’Verwendungszweck’: “OWAD donation” and the email address used to subscribe to OWAD.

Thanks so much,

Paul
(OWAD Founder)