Antedating of "Shaggy Dog Story"

[Baker, John]

        There was an article about shaggy dog stories in Esquire in the 1930s, reprinted in The Bedside Esquire (1940).  I can't lay my hands on my copy of The Bedside Esquire (a wonderful anthology) at the moment, but I believe it may have been "Don't Laugh Now," by J.C. Furnas.  It includes the original shaggy dog joke, from which the genre apparently takes its name.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Shapiro [mailto:fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 4:01 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Antedating of "Shaggy Dog Story"


The OED's earliest citation for "shaggy dog story" is dated 1946.  Here's
an antedating:

1944 Bennett Cerf _Try and Stop Me_ 323  Shaggy-dog stories, as almost
everybody must know by this time, are the kind of tales in which animals
talk, humans do inexplicable things, and the punch lines make no sense at
all.

Fred Shapiro


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