This article is about the game. For the hip hop artist, see Madlib. For the list game show, see Mad Libs (game show).
Not to be confused with ad libs in music.
The cover of the first Stern and Price Mad Libs book
Mad Libs is a word game created by Leonard Stern[1][2] and Roger Price.[3] It consists of one player prompting 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. It can be categorized as a phrasal template game.
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.[3]
History
Mad Libs was invented in 1953[4] by Leonard Stern and Roger Price. Stern and Price created the game, but could not agree on a name for their invention.[3] No name was chosen until five years later (1958), 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.[3] 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".[3] Stern and Price used that eavesdropped conversation to create, at length, the name "Mad Libs".[3] In 1958, the duo released the first book of Mad Libs, which resembled the earlier games[5] 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.[6]
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.[7] Together, the three founded the publishing firm Price Stern Sloan in the early 1960s as a way to release Mad Libs.[8] 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.[3][7]
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.[7]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,[9] and Sloan on October 14, 2012.[3][7][8]
More than 110 million copies of Mad Libs have been sold since the game series was first published in 1958.[3]
Predecessors of Mad Libs
It is unclear whether the creators of Mad Libs were aware of existing games and books similar to their own. One such game is Revelations about my Friends, published anonymously by Fredrick A. Stokes Companies in New York in 1912.[10][6] Like Mad Libs, the book invites the reader to choose words of different categories which then become part of a story. The nineteenth century parlor game "Consequences" and the surrealists' Exquisite Corpse game are also similar to Mad Libs.
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".[11] 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 a sentence which is comical, surreal and/or takes on somewhat of a nonsensical tone.
Stern and Price's original Mad Libs book gives the following sentence as an example:[12]
"___________!"
exclamation
he
said
________
adverb
as
he
jumped
into
his
convertible
______
noun
and
drove
off
with
his
_________
adjective
wife.
"___________!" he said ________ as he jumped into his convertible ______ and drove off with his _________ wife.
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 kids the parts of speech.[11][14]
Looney Labs released Mad Libs: The Game, a card game, in 2016. There is also a Mad Libs mobile app.
