Roger Price (comedian)

Roger Price (March 6, 1918 – October 31, 1990) was an American humorist, author and publisher, who created Droodles in the 1950s, followed by his collaborations with Leonard Stern on the Mad Libs series. Price and Stern, who met when they were writers on the Tonight show, became partners with Larry Sloan in the publishing firm Price Stern Sloan.

Price was born in Charleston, West Virginia. During the 1940s, he wrote for The Bob Hope Show and worked with Hope on a newspaper humor column. On Broadway he performed in Arthur Klein's musical revue, Tickets, Please! (1950), and he contributed sketch material to Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952. Price hosted the television panel show How To (1951), and he was a panelist on other game shows of the early 1950s: Who's There?, What Happened?, That Reminds Me, The Name's the Same and What's My Line? He was the co-creator with Stanley Ralph Ross of the 1977 NBC situation comedy The Kallikaks, and he also wrote for the show.

In 1953, Price invented Droodles, a syndicated feature which he described as "a borkley-looking sort of drawing that doesn't make any sense until you know the correct title." When Simon & Schuster published Price's Droodles in 1953, the book launched a Droodle craze that was fueled by a series of ads in college newspapers offering cash prizes for Droodles created by college students. In 1954, Price hosted a Droodles television game show with panelists Marc Connelly, Denise Lor and Carl Reiner. More Droodles were gathered in follow-up books, The Rich Sardine (1954) and Oodles of Droodles (1955). Over the years, many of the drawings (minus the author's droll commentary) have been reprinted in collections such as Classic Droodles. One of Price's original Droodles serves as the cover art for Frank Zappa's 1982 album Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. Price's other captions for that drawing include "Mother pyramid feeding her baby."

The same year the Droodle was born, Price and Stern invented Mad Libs, although the first book in the series was not published until 1958. The title came about when the two were in Sardi's and overheard an actor arguing with his agent. The actor wanted to “ad-lib” an interview, but his agent thought such an approach was “mad.”

According to Stern, the concept was hatched accidentally. Stern was scripting an episode for The Honeymooners in 1953 when Price came by. Stern recalled, “I was trying to find the right word to describe the nose of Ralph Kramden's new boss. So I asked Roger for an idea for an adjective and before I could tell him what it was describing, he threw out 'clumsy' and 'naked.' We both started laughing. We sat down and wrote a bunch of stories with blanks in them. That night we took them to a cocktail party and they were a great success... We were turned down by every publisher in the New York area. Publishers told us it wasn't a book and suggested we approach game manufacturers, but they also rejected us and advised us to talk to publishers. It became a well-worn path.”

Sally Lodge described the rise of Mad Libs in Publishers Weekly (March 31, 2008) after the initial 1958 publication:

Price had four articles in Harvey Kurtzman's Mad in 1955–56 and later contributed to Kurtzman's 1960s magazine Help!. In the introduction to Mad's first paperback collection, The Mad Reader (Ballantine Books, 1954), he described Kurtzman's appearance:

Other books by Price included The Great Roob Revolution (Random House, 1970), What Not to Name the Baby and In One Head and Out the Other (Ballantine, 1954), which popularized the catchphrase "I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there." The nonsense non sequitur was immediately adopted by science fiction fandom, appearing occasionally in science fiction fanzines, as noted in Fancyclopedia II (1959): Using the 18th century writer Edward Gibbons book "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" as a comparison to America's upheaval in the 60's, this satirical book compares Roman decline to America's woes, The Decline and Fall (1967)

I'm for Me First (Ballantine, 1954) is a humor book about Herman Clabbercutt's plan to launch a revolutionary political party known as the "I'm for Me First" Party. Price also wrote J.G., the Upright Ape (1960), which publisher Lyle Stuart claimed was one of his worst-selling books. It was described by Robert Michael Pyle in Orion Afield (Autumn 1998):

During the 1960s, Price opened the first New York art gallery devoted solely to cartoons, and in 1965–67 he edited his short-lived humor publication, Grump, which featured such contributors as Isaac Asimov, Christopher Cerf, Derek Robinson, Susan Sands, Jean Shepherd and cartoonist Don Silverstein.

One of Price's friends was the humor columnist Burt Prelutsky ("The Squeaky Wheel"), who recalled Price's interest in women:

At the time of his death in 1990, Price lived in Studio City, California.

In 2000, after Stern and Sloan launched another publishing company, Tallfellow Press, they acquired the rights to Droodles and reissued it as Droodles: The Classic Collection.

• Mame (1974) - Ralph Divine
• Mixed Company (1974) - The Doctor
• The Strongest Man in the World (1975) - Roger
• At Long Last Love (1975) - Alfred
• The Day of the Locust (1975) - Guest
• I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? (1975)
• Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977) - Senator
• Pete's Dragon (1977) - Man with Visor
• The Cat from Outer Space (1978) - 1st E.R.L. Expert
• Just You and Me, Kid (1979) - Mailman
• The Devil and Max Devlin (1981) - Old Man

• The Comedy Writer's Show with Roger Price and others (December 27, 1948)

• What's My Line? with Roger Price and others (July 29, 1956) on YouTube