Mad Libs

For the hip hop artist, see Madlib.

Mad Libs (from ad lib, a spontaneous improvisation) is a phrasal template word game where one player prompts another for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story, usually with funny results. The game is especially popular with American children and is frequently played as a party game or as a pastime.

Mad Libs was invented in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price, who published the first Mad Libs book themselves in 1958. It resembles the earlier games of Consequences and Exquisite Corpse. Mad Libs books are still published by Price Stern Sloan, an imprint of Penguin Group, cofounded by Price and Stern.

Contents

Format

Mad Libs consist of a book that has a short story on each page with many key words replaced with blanks. Beneath each blank is specified a lexical or other category, such as "noun", "verb", "place", or "part of the body". One player asks the other players, in turn, to contribute some word for 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:[1]

 "_____________! 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."

Books

Other media

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

See also

References

  1. ^ Price, Roger; Leonard Stern (1974). The Original Mad Libs 1. Price Stern Sloan. pp. 3. ISBN 9780843100556. 

External links