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• shaggy-dog story
  shaggy-dog story

  noun

  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
  shaggy dog story

  noun

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

shaggy-dog story

American  

[shag-ee-dawg, -dog] / ˈʃæg iˈdɔg, -ˈdɒg /

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.

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shaggy dog story British  

noun

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

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shaggy-dog story Idioms  

1. 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]

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Etymology

Origin of shaggy-dog story

First recorded in 1945–50

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

shaggy-dog story shaggy dog story

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 ● Sep. 4, 2022

“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 ● Dec. 8, 2021

I wouldn’t have dared say that out loud, but even then, I think, I somehow sensed that this was a climax that wouldn’t provide much resolution, a space-age shaggy-dog story.

From The New Yorker ● Jul. 18, 2019

The moth joke is not a shaggy-dog story, one of those ambling anecdotes with no point.

From New York Times ● Aug. 30, 2018

You heard that big, long shaggy-dog story about exactly what happened and where everybody was supposed to have been at the time.

From Murder in the Gunroom by H. Beam Piper

Its title notwithstanding, “Kim’s Video,” co-directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin and narrated by Redmon, is less a retail history than a shaggy dog story.

From New York Times ● Apr. 4, 2024

There was more enthusiasm from Clive Davis of the Times, who gave the show four stars, describing it as a "thoroughly entertaining shaggy dog story".

From BBC ● Mar. 14, 2024

Despite the multifariousness, “All-Night Pharmacy” is not a shaggy dog story.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 6, 2023

In an interview last year, Prince Harry and his fiancee, American actress Meghan Markle, told their own shaggy dog story.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 18, 2018

He was beginning to feel like a character in a shaggy dog story.

From Off Course by Kelly Freas