Serious purpose, unserious titles
Crosbie styled the organisation an “apocryphal society” and himself its Chairman of the Bored. Beneath the jokes was a clear educational idea: encourage children and adults to enjoy words, read more, and discover how flexible English could be.
By the early 1990s, the Foundation described a membership in the thousands. It published The Pundit, selected annual “Best-Stressed Puns,” supplied memberships to schools and teachers, organised an April Fool’s Day dinner in Chicago, and named a Punster of the Year.
“A day without puns is like a day without sunshine. There’s gloom for improvement.”
After Crosbie
When Crosbie died in 1994, Norman Gilbert succeeded him as the second Chairman of the Bored. Gilbert continued the Foundation and The Pundit through 2008, retiring from the chair at the beginning of 2009.
PunPunPun.com had been carrying Foundation material since about 1996. Gary Hallock later kept the website and its archive alive through 2023. After Hallock’s death, the legacy website shut down.
The present chapter
In 2026, family stewardship began reconstructing the archive and restoring the International Save the Pun Foundation as a Canadian not-for-profit devoted to language, writing, humour, wordplay, and related literary arts.