Editing Shaggy dog story (section)

==Archetypal story==
{{More citations needed section|date=December 2020}}
The eponymous [[wikt:shaggy|shaggy]] dog story serves as the [[archetype]] of the genre. The story builds up a repeated emphasizing of the dog's exceptional shagginess. The climax of the story culminates in a character reacting to the animal by 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. [[Ted Cohen (philosopher)|Ted Cohen]] gives the following example of this story:

{{quote|A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess.  When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions.  The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not that shaggy."<ref name=Cohen />}}

However, authorities disagree as to whether this particular story is the archetype after which the category is named. [[Eric Partridge]], for example, provides a very different story, as do William and Mary Morris in ''The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins''.

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. In the Partridge story, an aristocratic family living in [[Park Lane (road)|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."<ref>{{cite book|title=Secret of Humor|first=Leonard|last=Feinberg|year=1978|publisher=Rodopi|isbn=90-6203-370-9|pages=181&ndash;182}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=Shaggy Dog Story|work=World Wide Words|first=Michael|last=Quinion|url=http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sha1.htm|date=19 June 1999}}</ref>