THE SHAGGY ORANGE STORY (COMMENT).

THE SHAGGY ORANGE STORY (COMMENT). Mary Jane now calls the joke from a few days ago the “Shaggy Orange Story”. It was immediately identified in the comments as a shaggy dog story. I don’t know how I missed that because the earliest jokes I heard, from my father at the dinner table before I was ten, included shaggy dog stories. My father would announce before telling one that it was a shaggy dog story. In trying to explain Andrew Klavan’s claim that only writers seemed to like the shaggy orange story, I said that; “The surprise ending pleases those, like writers, who like plot twists.” Alan W called attention in a comment to this wikipedia article which makes the point that a plot twist is what shaggy dog stories do: “Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience’s preconceptions of the art 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.”