shaggy Идиома

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Shaggy dog story

A shaggy dog story is a joke which is a long story with a silly end.

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shaggy dog (story)|dog|shaggy|shaggy dog|shaggy do

n. phr. A special kind of joke whose long and often convoluted introduction and development delay the effect of the punch line. Uncle Joe only seems to bore his audiences with his long shaggy dog jokes, for when he comes to the long-awaited punch line, he gets very few laughs.

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shaggy-dog story

shaggy-dog story
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]