The anecdote is unhistorical history or apocryphal biography.

From A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin.   

This is a book of American storytelling—wise, witty, humorous, fantastic—in anecdote form. The anecdotes (short, pointed, pithy, pungent illustrative or attributed stories) are traveling anecdotes. They travel (and change and are handed down as they travel) by word of mouth and in print. They are swapped or passed along from person to person. They are transmitted through the medium of pulpit, political and lecture platform, stage, screen, radio, and television. They circulate in newspapers, periodicals, joke books, almanacs, books of ana,

and almanac collections.

Traveling anecdotes belong to floating literature—literature without known authorship or fixed form. As an illustrative story with a point, easily switched and altered to fit the occasion, the anecdote is folklore in decay or in the making, and may be based on or serve as the basis of a folk tale or proverb. As an attributed (“name” or celebrity) story, referring to a famous person and switched (by change of name) from one person to another, the anecdote is unhistorical history or apocryphal biography.