Thanks to this Board, I now know three new words to use for
a joke/story that is funny: creaser (England), howler and
ripper (from the lands Down Under).
Anybody got any more?

There is a term for a very long winded story that goes on and on... and on

I think it is a shaggy dog tale.

>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.

Tsuwm--
>>long ago and far away<<: to which side of The Force do you belong?
Anyway--edifying eponym. Thanks.
Now--I am filled with curiosity about two things: who on
earth would think of compiling a list of shaggy dog stories, and who on earth would want to read them??
Probably people with the same kind of morbid fascination
that makes me wonder about things like that!