![]() Blaine starts out with the ram ("There never was a bullier old ram than what he was"), and goes on for four more unparagraphed pages.Īlong the way, Blaine tells many stories, each of which connects back to the one before by some tenuous thread, and none of which has to do with the old ram. Twain's friends encourage him to go find a man called Jim Blaine when he is properly drunk, and ask him to tell "the stirring story about his grandfather's old ram." Twain, encouraged by his friends who have already heard the story, finally finds Blaine, an old silver miner, who sets out to tell Twain and his friends the tale. Mark Twain and the story of grandfather's old ram Ī typical shaggy dog story occurs in Mark Twain's book about his travels west, Roughing It. In the Partridge story, an aristocratic family living in Park Lane is searching for a lost dog, and an American answers the advertisement with a shaggy dog that he has found and personally brought across the Atlantic, only to be received by the butler at the end of the story who takes one look at the dog and shuts the door in his face, saying, "But not so shaggy as that, sir!" In the Morris story, the advertiser is organizing a competition to find the shaggiest dog in the world, and after a lengthy exposition of the search for such a dog, a winner is presented to the aristocratic instigator of the competition, who says, "I don't think he's so shaggy." Analysis Eric Partridge, for example, provides a very different story, as do William and Mary Morris in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.Īccording to Partridge and the Morrises, the archetypical shaggy dog story involves an advertisement placed in the Times announcing a search for a shaggy dog. However, authorities disagree as to whether this particular story is the archetype after which the category is named. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not that shaggy." The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions. When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. ![]() Ted Cohen gives the following example of this story:Ī boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. The climax of the story culminates in a character reacting to the animal, stating "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, both in the details (that the dog is shaggy) and in the delivery of a punchline, are thus subverted. The story builds up a repeated emphasizing of the dog's exceptional shagginess. The eponymous shaggy dog story serves as the archetype of the genre. ( December 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ![]() Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This section needs additional citations for verification.
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