Saturday, October 3, 2009

Mad Libs

Mad Libs was a phrasal template word game where one player prompted another for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story; these word substitutions had a humorous effect when the resulting story was then read aloud. It was invented in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price, who published the first Mad Libs book themselves in 1958.

For example, a Mad Lib might initially look like this:
"One day, (name of person) went to (place) and (past-tense verb) a (noun)."

After completing the Mad Lib, it might read:
"One day, John Doe went to Russia and ate a house."

2 comments:

  1. Those were cute! I remember them. They had book fairs at school and I would usually buy one of these.

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  2. I didn't realize that they had been around that long. We enjoyed these in the late 70's and early 80's.

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