The idea for This is True came not from reading other email newsletters — Cassingham maintains he wasn’t subscribed to any at the time — but from a corkboard he kept outside his office. “I would clip out news articles, highlight parts of them, hand write little comments on them, and stick it on the bulletin board,” he said. “And anytime I put up new news clips, people would gather at my bulletin board in the hallways, and they just loved this stuff.” A clipping from 1991, for instance, is about a woman who kept both her asthma inhaler and gun under her pillow, an unfortunate pairing that put her in the hospital with a bullet to the jaw. Cassingham’s commentary is written underneath it: “There she goes, shooting her mouth off again…”

The newsletter version was slightly different from what Cassingham posted to the office corkboard. After all, those articles were protected by copyright, so he couldn’t simply reprint them in full. Instead, he rewrote the stories in his own words, which made it much easier to quickly get to the point and set up a punchline. Each item ended with his pithy commentary, which often involved some sort of pun-based joke. The email was a couple hundred words, all painstakingly composed by Cassingham, but perhaps the most important line appeared at the very bottom. “When I sent out the first issue, I said that if you know anybody you think would like this, go ahead and forward it. It did have a copyright notice on it, but it said you’re welcome to forward it as long as you do it in its entirety.”