What Is a Shaggy Dog Story?
Quick answer: A shaggy dog story is a long, winding tale that ends in deliberate anticlimax, with the joke played on the listener. Definition, examples and craft uses.
A shaggy dog story is a long, elaborately detailed narrative that builds expectation for a payoff and then ends in deliberate anticlimax, often a groan-worthy pun or nothing at all. The joke is not in the story; the joke is on the audience, who invested in every winding digression believing it would matter. The name comes from a classic joke about a contest to find the world's shaggiest dog, which ends with a judge shrugging that the dog is not so shaggy.
Understanding the form matters even if you never write one, because the shaggy dog story is the photographic negative of good plotting. It works by breaking, on purpose, the exact promise every other story must keep: that the telling will be worth the listener's time.
The longer answer: anticlimax as the punchline
The essential machinery is misdirected investment. The teller piles up specifics, delays, and apparent clues, training the audience to expect proportionate reward; length and detail are the setup. Then the ending refuses the reward, and the laugh, when it comes, is a laugh at one's own credulity. This is why shaggy dog stories are best performed aloud, where the audience is captive: the longer they cannot escape, the harder the deflation lands.
Note the difference from a simple bad ending. A failed story disappoints by accident; a shaggy dog story disappoints by design, and signals its game to those who know the form through its very excess of pointless detail. Connoisseurs enjoy watching the machine run. There is also a pun-driven subspecies, sometimes called a feghoot, where the entire epic exists to justify one agonising play on words in the final line.
Examples from the masters of the wind-up
Mark Twain built his early fame on the mode. His sketch The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County wraps a pointless-on-purpose anecdote inside a frame where the narrator himself complains of being trapped by a rambling old miner, and Twain's lecture performances reportedly stretched such tales until audiences realised, delightedly, that they were the joke. Laurence Sterne got there a century earlier: Tristram Shandy spends an entire novel failing to get its hero born, digression triumphing over plot as a running gag.
In the pun branch, Isaac Asimov wrote science fiction feghoots with unrepentant glee, including a tale titled Shah Guido G. whose title itself confesses the crime. Spoken-word comedians keep the oral tradition alive with jokes that run ten minutes to reach a one-word deflation. The form even shadows literary fiction: some readers class Herman Melville's endless cetology chapters as shaggy technique, making the reader live the obsessive digression the book is about.
How to use the technique in your own writing
If you want to write one straight, commit fully. The detail must be vivid enough to hold attention on its own merits, the digressions must feel pregnant with significance, and the ending must arrive with a straight face. Undercommitted shaggy dog stories read as ordinary failures, so the craft is all in confidence and pacing. Keep it short on the page; readers can close a book, so written versions tolerate far less wind-up than spoken ones.
The subtler use is borrowing the parts. Comic novelists deploy shaggy digressions inside otherwise rewarding plots to characterise a narrator who cannot get to the point. Anticlimax, used once and deliberately, can be devastating in serious fiction: build toward the duel, the confession, the reunion, then let it fizzle, and the fizzle becomes your statement about the character or the world. The skill you are really practising is expectation management, the same one every ending depends on.
Common mistakes and misconceptions
The commonest mistake is thinking length alone makes the form. A long boring story is just a long boring story; the shaggy dog variety needs an audience actively predicting a payoff, which means the middle must keep promising through planted, apparently meaningful detail. Every digression should look like a clue. If nothing seems to matter along the way, the ending cannot betray anything.
The second error is deploying true anticlimax in fiction that made sincere promises. If your novel spends three hundred pages building a mystery, an on-purpose shrug of an ending will feel indistinguishable from an accidental one, and reviews will not award you the irony. Readers forgive a five-minute joke at their expense; they do not forgive a fifteen-hour one. Match the size of the betrayal to the size of the investment you asked for.
What poets can take from this
- Make every digression look like a planted clue; a shaggy dog story dies when nothing seems to matter.
- Keep written versions short; readers tolerate far less wind-up than a captive live audience.
- Deliver the anticlimax with a straight face and no apology.
- Borrow the parts: one deliberate fizzle in a serious story can say more than a climax.
- Never spend novel-length trust on a joke ending; scale the betrayal to the investment.
Try it yourself
Write a two-page story in which a narrator recounts, with mounting urgency and suspiciously precise detail, the chain of events that led to a life-changing discovery, and end it on the flattest possible sentence. Then rewrite the same material with a real payoff and compare which details you kept.
Questions
Where does the name shaggy dog story come from?
From a much-retold joke, popular by the early twentieth century, about a lengthy search for the world's shaggiest dog that ends with the prize judge dismissing the animal as not so shaggy. The joke's structure, huge buildup and flat deflation, named the whole genre.
What is a feghoot?
A feghoot is the pun-powered subspecies: a story, often science fiction, engineered entirely so its final line can land an elaborate play on words. The name comes from a long-running series of such tales about a character called Ferdinand Feghoot.
Is a shaggy dog story the same as an anticlimax?
Anticlimax is the ingredient; the shaggy dog story is a whole dish built from it. Any story can suffer or deploy an anticlimax, but the shaggy dog form makes the disproportion between buildup and payoff the entire point.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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