The pun is not dead.
It was resting in the archive. Enter the story of John S. Crosbie, the International Save the Pun Foundation, and a worldwide fellowship built on the smaller excellencies of language.
Archival O. Henry Pun-Off footage.
Pun of the day
An actual recovered Pundit pun, every day.
“Seven days without pizza makes one weak.”
The Pundit · 2007 · Browse Pundit puns →
Permanent collection
Stories, not storage.
The original site was a marvellous thicket of newsletters, awards, annual events, member pages, and wordplay. This museum turns that evidence into rooms a visitor can actually enter.
John S. Crosbie
Writer, advertising executive, magazine-industry leader, compiler of a landmark pun dictionary, and the original Chairman of the Bored.
The Foundation
Why a joke organisation became a real community devoted to reading, language, and shared delight.
Punsters of the Year
Meet the teachers, doctors, cartoonists, writers, magicians, filmmakers, and performers honoured from 1988 onward.
The O. Henry Pun-Off
Continue to the Pun-Off’s own website for the living event and its history.
The Pundit
Fourteen years under Crosbie, followed by the Gilbert era and the surviving electronic run through 2008.
The Pundit documents
Browse the recovered scans issue by issue and month by month, with the original pages intact.
Puns from The Pundit
Browse actual reviewed jokes and groaners from the newsletter instead of raw webpage fragments.
Word games
Riddles, PunToons, chiasmus, punned haiku, and the stranger corners of the old site.
The Bookshelf
John S. Crosbie’s books, then the wider reading list preserved by PunPunPun.com.
The Memorial Fund
Scholarships, preservation awards, young punsters, and the future institutions of wordplay.
The image gallery
People, event photographs, awards, signs, and physical objects recovered from the archive.
The governing principle
“There’s gloom for improvement.”
The Foundation’s motto turned a groan into a mission: make reading feel playful, give word lovers a place to meet, and insist that linguistic misbehaviour deserved its own institutions.
A very brief history
From print to pun.
The timeline follows the Foundation, The Pundit, PunPunPun.com, and the people who kept them going.
The Foundation is founded
John S. Crosbie establishes the International Save the Pun Foundation in 1977.
The Pundit begins
Crosbie begins editing and publishing The Pundit, the Foundation’s newsletter. He would produce it for about fourteen years, until his death in 1994.
Punster of the Year
Joel Goodman becomes the first honouree in the surviving roster, beginning an annual tradition celebrating professional and amateur wordplay.
April Fool’s Day in Chicago
Crosbie and Joyce Heitler establish the annual punsters’ dinner, an exuberant ritual of awards, costumes, performance, and groans.
Norman Gilbert takes the chair
Crosbie dies on 10 January 1994. Norman Gilbert succeeds him as the Foundation’s second Chairman of the Bored and continues The Pundit.
PunPunPun.com goes online
PunPunPun.com begins carrying Foundation material on the web, including The Pundit, award profiles, event pages, photographs, and archives.
The Pundit ends
The final run of The Pundit closes with the end of 2008.
Norm Gilbert retires
Norman Gilbert retires as Chairman of the Bored at the beginning of 2009.
Gary Hallock keeps the website alive
Gary Hallock continues maintaining PunPunPun.com and its archive until his death in 2023.
The legacy website goes dark
After Hallock’s death, PunPunPun.com ceases operating as the Foundation’s active website.
The archive returns
Family stewardship begins rebuilding the International Save the Pun Foundation and recovering its surviving print and web record.