This year I debuted my workshop “The Care and Feeding of your Shaggy Dog.” What follows is a revised and abbreviated version of the workshop’s “history and theory” lecture.

It turns out that there’s a significant sector of the general public that doesn’t know what we’re talking about when we refer to a “shaggy dog story.” I’m often asked to define the term.

My standard one-line response is that it’s “a sauntering, meandering, digressive mode of storytelling that winds inexorably towards a disappointing groaner of a conclusion.” Put another way by one on-line source, it’s “a long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminating in an anticlimax.”

As for its origin, narrative for the pure joy of narrative has been with our species since the beginning of spoken language. We’ve always been “shortening the night” and “shortening the road” by elongating the story, and that has usually meant plenty of sidetracks and side trips. Odysseus didn’t get trapped by giants and kidnapped by sorceresses because that’s what happened, necessarily, but because that’s what the audience needed, to be kept on that ride as long as possible.

The first known mention of the shaggy dog story in print seems to have occurred in Esquire Magazine in May of 1937. But prior to the naming, the shaggy dog as we know it today seems to have really come in to its own in the mining camps and turbulent boomtowns of the American west. A classic of the genre, about “Jim Blaine’s Grandfather’s Old Ram,” was committed to ink as Chapter 53 of Mark Twain’s great 1872 work about his western travels, Roughing It. A significantly different version of the story became a mainstay of Twain’s traveling act on the lecture circuit. Both versions feature Twain being told that he has to hear this miner Jim Blaine’s story about his grandfather’s old ram, but that Blaine needed to be comfortably and sociably drunk to properly deliver the tale. Finally, one evening he stops by Blaine’s cabin, and other men inform him that Blaine is tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk, and that he’s about to begin. Twain finds a seat, and Blaine starts to speak.

The ram is mentioned in the first couple of sentences, but the story quickly veers away and variously forks to touch on frontier mating behavior, prayer meetings, glass eyes and their shared use, borrowed wooden legs and wigs, a scheme to bilk a coffin-maker, encounters of missionaries with cannibals, dogs’ lack of dependability as agents of Providence, and the tale of a man being sucked into a weaving machine and turned into 39 yards of three-ply carpet…at that point Blaine finally falls completely asleep on his powder keg, and what became of his grandfather and his ram remains a mystery to this very day. There you have the basic structureless structure of a shaggy dog.

The first thing I ever remember reading about how to tell a story was Twain’s cogently titled essay “How to tell a Story,” in which he is makes the distinction between what he calls the “comic” story (what we would call a “joke”) and the “humorous story,” which is what I would call a shaggy dog. The whole essay is worth reading and rereading, but his basic point is contained in this short paragraph:

“The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic story must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the other bursts.” Twain goes on to say that the same basic story can be either what we are calling a shaggy dog or a joke; the momentous difference is whether it is told with an emphasis on the journey or the destination.

And now for a confession: I’ve been attracted to this art form for a very long time, since I was a much younger man, and there was a time when I indulged in it with impure motives. Yes, siblings, I gloried in the trickery of it, in leading innocent people down a long, winding primrose path that led almost exactly nowhere.

But as I’ve lived with it over time, the spiritual meaning of this genre has begun to work its way into me and win me over. You heard me right, “the spiritual meaning.” You see, I’ve come to see that the joy of pure narrative that shaggy dogs offer, combined with the disappointing conclusion, is directly analogous to life. It’s a reflection on mortality, for god’s sake! It urges us to glory in the process, and not to worry so much about the end of the journey. We remember Don Quijote for the windmills, and all the adventures and turns in the road, not for the disappointing deathbed at the end of the story.

I wish you diverting travels. May your inevitable disappointing finish not find you too soon.