Before the World Wide Web and its graphics, there were gathering places where people would communicate using text. One of those places was GEnie, an online service hosted by General Electric. Within GEnie was the RoundTable called TeleJoke, and within that, Category 9, The Punnery. Posts from The Punnery from early 1991 through September 1993 are presented here. It's all basic text, which means those of us posting had to use our imaginations. It was a relatively small group of people who gathered in The Punnery and the cast changed over time. I'm still in touch online with a few of the people, but the only one I've met in person is my sister.

If you prefer, you can get right into The Punnery by clicking on a menu item on the right side of this page. Every item from Lackluster Video to the end will take you to one of The Punnery's pages. You can start with any page that interests you; there is no real order to them.

The Punnery on GEnie

Back in December 1991, I came across the TeleJoke RoundTable on GEnie. (This link will take you to Wikipedia's entry for GEnie.) TeleJoke was a product of the mind of Brad Templeton, who set up the USENET newsgroup rec.humor.funny in 1987. GEnie is defunct, but the newsgroup is still going strong, although Brad isn't running it any more. He is currently the Chairman of the Board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Punnery takes its name from Richard Lederer's book Get Thee to a Punnery. I hadn't been very active online until I found The Punnery in December 1991; I was almost ready to cancel my GEnie membership when I decided to check out TeleJoke. Instead of cancelling, I found my first online home with a group of very talented punsters brainstorming on a wide variety of topics including movies, foreign language phrases used in English, cars, doctors and medicine, celebrities, limericks, Tom Swifties, and more - around 30 Topics in all.

The Punnery was much like an online forum today, although due to General Electric restricting usage to non-business hours unless someone wanted to pay high per-minute rates, people would end up doing a lot of their posting offline and then post as soon as it became 6 p.m. local time. In time, we added a monthly chat, called a RoundTable Conference, or RTC. This was real brainstorming.

When Brad closed TeleJoke in September 1993, The Punnery moved to another GEnie RoundTable, Writers INK. Jane Ring, the TeleJoke assistant sysop in charge of The Punnery, said she wanted to step down from that post, although she would continue posting. I got the job which was strictly volunteer. For the move, I archived all the Topics to place in the Writers INK library, and I saved a copy of the whole thing in .zip files. Zipped, it fit on one 3 1/2" floppy disk which I managed to hang on to for 14 years and three moves. I left The Punnery in 1994, but the group continued on. One of my partners in the crime of punishment, Dick Ford, has a page about the old GEnie Punnery, with a link to an AOL chat session from 1996 with Claudia, Eric, and Ralph, who were all regular contributors to The Punnery in the TeleJoke days. These sessions are still held, currently on Sunday evenings.

The Punnery on Have Pun Will Travel

On the following pages, I present entries from The Punnery. To start with, only my entries were extracted because I will not present other people's work without their express permission. The only exceptions were a couple of cases where others quoted radio shows or magazines without adding anything of their own. Comments made by topic originators, with credit, appear at the top of each page. Very brief quotes of other posts to establish context are also used, with the > symbol commonly used to indicate quoting.

These pages were revised in July 2008 after I got permission from the following people to post their material:

• Dick Ford
• Ralph Stipo
• Claudia Ballou
• Eric Stone
• Marilyn Wales
• Sue Bell

I thank them very much for their permission! You may notice at the beginning of many pages there are a lot of posts from Ralph all in a row. That is because he began posting in The Punnery on GEnie several months before the rest of us. Dick, Eric and Claudia started next. Marilyn and Sue started posting after I did.

The Punnery on GEnie was much like an online brainstorming session. Some of what we posted there and now present here built upon posts of my fellow punsters. Many posts will never appear simply because there's no way to contact everyone.

You'll notice some gaps in the dates - sometimes gaps spanning a month or more. It's either because nobody represented here posted while others did, or sometimes a topic fell quiet. You may also notice some repetition. A poster would be inspired to post a pun, unaware that another poster may have posted it months earlier. I spotted one or two times when I repeated myself without realizing it.

I have resisted any urges to "improve" the humor with editing. Occasionally some editing was required to remove off-topic remarks directed at other punsters, or to make things clear if a post was a response to someone else's. Other than that, most editing was to remove extraneous information from message headers and italicize the headers, correct obvious spelling errors, then format the text for the page width. In some instances, graphics have been used to replace ASCII graphics that did not survive from one format to another.