winner is presented to the aristocratic instigator of the competition, who says, "I don't think he's so shaggy." Analysis Humanities scholar Jane Marie Todd observed that the shaggy dog story demonstrates the nature of desiring humor and how that process occurs. Examples in literature Mark Twain and the story of grandfather's old ram A typical shaggy dog story occurs in Mark Twain's book about his travels west, Roughing It. 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." Twain, encouraged by his friends who have already heard the story, finally finds Blaine, an old silver miner, who sets out to tell Twain and his friends the tale. Blaine starts out with the ram ("There never was a bullier old ram than what he was"), and goes on for four more unparagraphed pages. Along the way, Blaine tells many stories, each of which connects back to the one before by some tenuous thread, and none of which has to do with the old ram. Among these stories are a tale of boiled missionaries; of a lady who borrows a false eye, a peg leg, and the wig of a coffin-salesman's wife; and a final tale of a man who gets caught in machinery at a carpet factory and whose "widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in ..." As Blaine tells the story of the carpet man's funeral, he begins to fall asleep, and Twain, looking around, sees his friends "suffocating with suppressed laughter." 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." Nikolai Gogol and the story of Captain Kopeikin 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. The novel's central character, Chichikov, arrives in a Russian town and begins purchasing deceased serfs ("souls") from the local landowners, thus relieving the landowners of a tax burden based on an infrequent census. As confusion and suspicion about