Mad Libs is a phrasal templateword game where one player prompts others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story before reading aloud. The game is frequently played as a party game or as a pastime. The game was invented in the United States, and more than 110 million copies of Mad Libs books have been sold since the series was first published in 1958.
History
Mad Libs was invented in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price. Stern and Price co-created the game, but could not agree on a name for their invention. No name was chosen until five years later, when Stern and Price were eating eggs Benedict at a restaurant in New York City. While eating, the two overheard an argument at a neighboring table between a talent agent and an actor. According to Price and Stern, during the overheard argument, the actor said that he wanted to "ad-lib" an upcoming interview. The agent, who clearly disagreed with the actor's suggestion, retorted that ad-libbing an interview would be "mad". Stern and Price used that eavesdropped conversation to create, at length, the name "Mad Libs". The duo released the first Mad Libs book themselves in 1958. The first Mad Libs resembled the earlier games of consequences and exquisite corpse. Stern was head writer and comedy director for The Steve Allen Show, and suggested to the show's host that guests be introduced using Mad Libs completed by the audience. Four days after an episode introduced "our guest NOUN, Bob Hope", bookstores sold out of Mad Libs books. Stern and Price next partnered with Larry Sloan, a high school friend who was working as a publicist at the time, to continue publishing Mad Libs. Together, the three founded the publishing firm Price Stern Sloan in the early 1960s as a way to release Mad Libs. In addition to releasing more than 70 editions of Mad Libs under Sloan, the company also published 150 softcover books, including such notable titles as How to Be a Jewish Mother, first released in 1964; Droodles, which was also created by Roger Price; The VIP Desk Diary; and the series World's Worst Jokes. Price died in 1990, and three years later, Sloan and Stern sold Price Stern Sloan, including Mad Libs, to the former Putnam Berkley Group, which is now known as Penguin Random House. Mad Libs books are still published by Penguin Random House, however, all references to Price Stern Sloan have been removed from the company's official website. Stern died at age 88 on June 7, 2011, and Sloan died on October 14, 2012. More than 110 million copies of Mad Libs have been sold since the game series was first published in 1958.
Format
Mad Libs books contain short stories on each page with many key words replaced with blanks. Beneath each blank is specified a category, such as "noun", "verb", "place", "celebrity," "Exclamation" or "part of the body". One player asks the other players, in turn, to contribute a word of the specified type for each blank, but without revealing the context for that word. Finally, the completed story is read aloud. The result is usually comic, surreal and somewhat nonsensical. Stern and Price's original Mad Libs book gives the following sentence as an example: "___________! he said ________ as he jumped into his convertible exclamation adverb
______ and drove off with his _________ wife." noun adjective After completion, they demonstrate that the sentence might read: "Ouch! he said stupidly as he jumped into his convertible cat and drove off with his brave wife."
A game show called Mad Libs, with some connections to the game, aired on the Disney Channel in 1998 and 1999. Several imitations of Mad Libs have been created, most of them on the Internet. Imitation Mad Libs are sometimes used in educational settings to help teach the parts of speech. Looney Labs released Mad Libs: The Game, a card game, in 2016.
