The Punnery

I've loved puns and other forms of wordplay for as long as I can remember. My father used to come up with a pun now and then, and I always thought they were fun. I remember reading joke books in grade school that students could order through a service made available, I think, from National Scholastic. Also in grade school, there was a series of stories we read about a boy from a small town called Centerville. It was a typical small town, and one thing I remember was the town barber tended to spook in Speenerisms- I mean, speak in Spoonerisms. This sharpened my reading appetite for offbeat humor, and has led to another lens, Spoonerisms.

I became a science fiction reader in the '60s, and got to know of Isaac Asimov's love of puns and wordplay. In the '70s, Spider Robinson began his series of stories about Callahan's Saloon. Spider loves puns, and several times he featured Punday Night in his stories, where the regulars would keep trying to top each other's puns until there was a winner who got free drinks for the night, although the true prize was bragging rights. It was the 80's before I discovered Spider, but he was an instant hit with me.

Back in the early '90s, when the Internet was text-based, the GEnie online service hosted what they called Round Tables (today they're usually called forums). One was TeleJoke, started by Brad Templeton, who had started the USENET newsgroup rec.humor.funny in 1987. Within TeleJoke was Category 9, The Punnery, which became an online home to punslingers from all over.

I discovered The Punnery in December '91, and it became my first online hangout. I was with it until TeleJoke closed in September '93. As part of a move to another Round Table, I archived all the posts. As zipped files, they all fit on one 3 1/2" floppy disk - try doing that with today's graphics-heavy web pages! The Punnery on TeleJoke grew to over 30 topics ranging from movies to famous people to foreign language phrases to food to limericks to Tom Swifties.

On my website, Have Pun Will Travel, I created a section called The Punnery. It includes two dozen pages of posts by GEnie Punnery participants Dick Ford, Claudia Ballou, Ralph Stipo, Eric Stone, Sue Bell, Marilyn Wales (my sister) and me. Previously only my posts and those from Dick Ford had been included, but in July 2008 I did a major revision to include posts from the others. They are people I am still in touch with and they were kind enough to grant permission to use their work. There were many others who contributed but who could not be reached for permission to include their posts.

Even though The Punnery on Have Pun Will Travel started off with only one enthusiastic poster's work (mine), it was very much a collaboration as punsters often built upon the ideas suggested by previous posts. For example, in the topic "Stories with Morals," I started a story about mushrooms and then wrote, "Oh, wait a minute. This is the wrong topic - 'Stories with morals,' not 'Stories with morels.'" That idea of playing with the topic title mushroomed into more than 90 posts.

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