>I think it is a shaggy dog tale.

long ago and far away, I had occasion to post this:

I have long wondered if there was a word for this kind of "shaggy-dog story" but now I have the power of the internet to help find an answer:

(Webster's Collegiate defines a shaggy-dog story as "a long-drawn-out circumstantial story concerning an inconsequential happening that impresses the teller as humorous but the hearer as boring and pointless; also: a similar humorous story whose humor lies in the pointlessness or irrelevance of the punch line")

I found a shaggy-dog story archive http://awpi.com/Combs/Shaggy/index.html which states as follows:

A special version of the shaggy dog story originated in a long-running series in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This was "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot". Typically, these would tell a science-fiction story that ended in a PUNchline. Such stories and their imitations became known as feghoots.