Meaning
A long, rambling joke or anecdote, packed with deliberate detours and irrelevant detail, that ends in a flat or absurd punchline. The comedy lies in the storyteller's nerve in making the audience wait far too long for a payoff that turns out to be deliberately pointless. Hyphenate as shaggy-dog story when it sits before a noun. Reserve it for jokes whose excessive length is the point, not for any merely long story. Regional use: General English (arose in American English).
Origin
The origin is genuinely uncertain and specialists say so plainly. The name is popularly tied to 1930s American jokes about hunting a remarkably shaggy dog that ends with a deflating verdict such as 'not so shaggy' - rival versions are attributed to Eric Partridge and to William and Mary Morris, and Michael Quinion calls the origins poorly understood and the origin anecdotes apocryphal. The first known print use of the term is J. C. Furnas's piece in Esquire in May 1937 - though Furnas himself rejected the claim that the shaggy-dog tale was the first of its kind - and Word Histories documents earlier uses from 1914, 1918, 1930, and 1935, by which time the phrase was established enough to need no explanation. The genre is older still: Mark Twain included an extended example in Roughing It (1872).
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- shaggy dog story
- shaggy dog tale
- shaggy dog yarn
Usage Examples
- Uncle Brett told a shaggy dog story about a lost canoe paddle, and after ten minutes the punchline was a groan-worthy pun.
- The best man's speech turned into a shaggy dog story; the toast finally landed with a sigh, not a laugh.
- That meeting was a shaggy dog story: forty minutes of detours ending in 'let's revisit next quarter'.