Juha — Nasreddin Hodja in Turkish, Goha in Egyptian — is a fool who is often the wisest person in the story, and the tales about him are almost aggressively short.

One example

Juha’s neighbour asks to borrow his donkey. Juha says the donkey is not at home. At that moment the donkey brays from the stable. The neighbour is indignant. Juha says: "Who do you believe, me or the donkey?"

Why it works

• The setup is a situation everyone recognises, so no time is spent on establishing a world.
• The reversal arrives in the last line and reframes everything before it.
• The moral is left entirely to the listener. Tell someone what to think and the story becomes a lesson; leave it out and it becomes theirs.

That third point is the one modern storytelling most often gets wrong. A great deal of writing explains its own significance in the final paragraph, and every time it does, it takes something away from the reader that they would have enjoyed doing themselves.