ANECDOTE

by Wikipedia,

An  anecdote  is a short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a  bon mot . An anecdote is always presented as based on a real incident ^[1]  involving actual persons, whether famous or not, usually in an identifiable place. 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 in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to its very essence.  Novalis  observed "Eine Anekdote ist eines historisches Element — ein historisches Molekül oder Epigramm". ^[2]  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.

The word  anecdote  (in  Greek : "unpublished", literally "not given out") comes from  Procopius of Caesarea , the biographer of  Justinian I , who produced a work entitled Ἀνέκδοτα ( Anekdota , variously translated as Unpublished Memoirs  or  Secret History ), which is primarily a collection of short incidents from the private life of the  Byzantine  court. Gradually, the term  anecdote  came to be applied ^[3]  to any short tale utilized to emphasize or illustrate whatever point the author wished to make. ^[4]