shaggy-dog story

[ shag-ee-dawg, -dog ]

noun

1. a funny story, traditionally about a talking dog, that, after an often long and involved narration of unimportant incidents, has an absurd or irrelevant punch line.

shaggy dog story

noun

1. informal.
   a long rambling joke ending in a deliberate anticlimax, such as a pointless punch line

Word History and Origins

Origin of shaggy-dog story¹

First recorded in 1945–50

Idioms and Phrases

A long drawn-out anecdote with an absurd or anticlimactic ending. For example, At first he had us laughing wildly at his shaggy-dog stories, but after the third or fourth we found them tiresome . The term alludes to a well-known series of such stories, which involved a talking dog. [c. 1940]

Example Sentences

This particular shaggy-dog story gets very shaggy, and at times it’s not clear whether Buckley himself knows where he wants the narrative to go.

From Washington Post

He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism.

From New York Times

“Licorice Pizza”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy-dog story of self-discovery in ’70s San Fernando Valley feels to me like a loose, easy-breathing culmination for Anderson, a virtuoso filmmaker here at his most tender and organic.

From Seattle Times

The cumulative charms of these narrative byways fade as Koberidze’s meandering extends to two and a half hours, though the end section is glorious and there’s much to appreciate about a movie that reminds you that at times the best parts of a shaggy-dog story are the ostensibly pointless ones.

From New York Times

It laid out one thoughtful shaggy-dog story after another, then ended in this haymaker of a final episode that brought us sidelong to the arrival of the pandemic, which brought the season’s threads together even as, one by one, it snipped our threads of connection.

From New York Times