Shaggy dog story  

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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 also known as yarns, coming from the long tradition of campfire yarns.

Shaggy dog stories play upon the preconceptions of the art of joke telling that are held by their audience. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Shaggy dog story" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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