In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.

[5] Humanities scholar Jane Marie Todd observed that the shaggy-dog story demonstrates the nature of desiring humor and how that process occurs.

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.

According to Partridge and the Morrises, the archetypical shaggy-dog story involves an advertisement placed in the Times announcing a search for a shaggy dog.

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.

They now inform him that "at a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep [Blaine] from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram—and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had heard him get, concerning it."

A lengthy shaggy-dog story (roughly 2,500 words in English translation) takes place in chapter 10 of Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls, first published in 1842.

At the time, financial or other support was not readily provided to soldiers in such condition as a result of combat wounds, and Captain Kopeikin struggles to pay for room and board with his quickly depleted funds.

As his situation becomes increasingly dire, Kopeikin takes it upon himself to confront the leader of "a kind of high commission, a board or whatever, you understand, and the head of it is general-in-chief so-and-so."