|
Shaggy Dog Stories
In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically non sequitur (literary device), irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax (narrative), anticlimax. In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending. Shaggy-dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of joke-telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. A lengthy shaggy-dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the long-awaited resolution is essentially meaningless, with the joke as a whole playing upon people's search for meaning (philosophy), meaning. The nature of their delivery is reflected in the Englis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Anecdote
An anecdote is "a story with a point", such as to communicate an abstract idea about a person, place, or thing through the concrete details of a short narrative or to characterize by delineating a specific quirk or trait. Anecdotes may be real or fictional; the anecdotal digression is a common feature of literary works and even oral anecdotes typically involve subtle exaggeration and dramatic shape designed to entertain the listener. An anecdote is always presented as the recounting of a real incident involving actual people and usually in an identifiable place. In the words of Jürgen Hein, they exhibit "a special realism" and "a claimed historical dimension". Etymology and usage The word ''anecdote'' (in Greek: ἀνέκδοτον "unpublished", literally "not given out") comes from Procopius of Caesarea, the biographer of Emperor Justinian I (). Procopius produced a work entitled (''Anekdota'', variously translated as ''Unpublished Memoirs'' or as ''Secret History'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
