Anecdote
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For a comparison of anecdote with other kinds of stories, see Myth, legend, fairy tale, and fable.
An anecdote is a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is usually based on real life, an incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, in real places. However, over time, modification in reuse may convert a particular anecdote to a fictional piece, one that is retold but is "too good to be true". Sometimes humorous, anecdotes are not jokes, because their primary purpose is not simply to evoke laughter, but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, or to delineate a character trait or the workings of an institution in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to their very essence. A brief monologue beginning "A man pops in a bar..." will be a joke. A brief monologue beginning "Once J. Edgar Hoover popped in a bar..." will be an anecdote. An anecdote thus is closer to the tradition of the parable than the patently invented fable with its animal characters and generic human figures— but it is distinct from the parable in the historical specificity which it claims. An anecdote is not a metaphor nor does it bear a moral, a necessity in both parable and fable, merely an illustrative incident that is in some way an epitome.

Absent-minded Creator

After a devastating electrical storm one day, Thomas Edison was visited by a group of vestrymen seeking advice regarding the erection of lightning rods on a certain building in Orange, New Jersey.
Edison asked the men what kind of building it was. "A church," they replied. "By all means put lightning rods on," Edison advised. "You know Providence is absent-minded at times!"

Dizzy Comment

Dizzy Dean was as famed for his verbal bloopers as a baseball announcer as he had been for his performance as a player. "The game," he declared after one outing, "was closer than the score indicated." The score in question? 1-0.

Cruel Intentions?

Among Reese Witherspoon's most challenging performances was the pivotal breakup scene in Cruel Intentions with her fellow actor - and future husband - Ryan Phillippe.
"We'd gotten so tired and we'd done the scene so many times," she recalled. "He was off-camera giving me my lines and he started to ad lib - which is a bad thing when you're doing this kind of scene, and talking like, 'I never loved you! You're not attractive!' Terrible things. I got upset."

How so? "I just hauled off and socked him in the face. And everybody in the crew was like, 'Gasp! Can you believe she did that?' And I'm screaming my lines and I just yelled, 'Get out!'

Phillippe's response? "He ran off and threw up in a stairwell. And I'm, like, sobbing, saying, 'I can't believe he said those things to me!' And the director [Roger Kumble] came in..."

The director's response? "He said, 'I can't believe it,'" Witherspoon recalled. "'That was so great! Can you do it again!?'"

Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys's wife entered their home one day and caught her husband embracing the cook. "Samuel!" she exclaimed. "You surprise me!"
Pepys replied, "No, my dear, it is you who have surprised me, I merely astonished you."

Bionic Woman

During an appearance on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" in April 2003, Jamie King confirmed that her mother had indeed named her after the bionic woman. King's mother, the actress explained, was a huge fan of Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner). "It's a good thing," Conan replied, "your mother wasn't a Kojack fan!"