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Roger Price (comedy)
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
humorist, author and publisher, who created Droodle
Droodle
Droodles was a syndicated cartoon feature created by Roger Price and collected in his 1953 book Droodles. The trademarked name "Droodle" is a nonsense word suggesting "doodle", "drawing" and "riddle." Their general form is minimal: a square box containing a few abstract pictorial elements with a...
s in the 1950s, followed by his collaborations with Leonard Stern on the Mad Libs
Mad Libs
Mad Libs 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...
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 Stern Sloan
Price Stern Sloan or PSS! is a publisher that was founded in Los Angeles in the early 1960s to publish the Mad Libs that Roger Price and Leonard Stern had concocted during their stint as writers for Steve Allen's Tonight Show and also the Droodles...
.
Price was born in Charleston, West Virginia
Charleston, West Virginia
Charleston is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of West Virginia. It is located at the confluence of the Elk and Kanawha Rivers in Kanawha County. As of the 2010 census, it has a population of 51,400, and its metropolitan area 304,214. It is the county seat of Kanawha County.Early...
. During the 1940s, he wrote for The Bob Hope Show
Bob Hope
Bob Hope, KBE, KCSG, KSS was a British-born American comedian and actor who appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in radio, television and movies. He was also noted for his work with the US Armed Forces and his numerous USO shows entertaining American military personnel...
and worked with Hope on a newspaper humor column. On Broadway he performed in Arthur Klein's musical revue, Tickets, Please!
Tickets, Please!
Tickets, Please! was a 1950 Broadway revue, composed by Harold Hastings. It is also notable as the first theatre credit of Larry Kert....
(1950), and he contributed sketch material to Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952
New Faces of 1952
New Faces of 1952 is a musical revue with songs and comedy skits. It ran on Broadway for nearly a year in 1952 and was then made into a motion picture in 1954...
. 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?
What's My Line?
What's My Line? is a panel game show which originally ran in the United States on the CBS Television Network from 1950 to 1967, with several international versions and subsequent U.S. revivals. The game tasked celebrity panelists with questioning contestants in order to determine their occupations....
Droodles
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 & SchusterSimon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...
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
Marc Connelly
Marcus Cook Connelly was an American playwright, director, producer, performer, and lyricist. He was a key member of the Algonquin Round Table, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930.-Biography:...
, Denise Lor
Denise Lor
Denise Lor is an American popular singer and actress.She was a featured artist on Garry Moore's television show.Ms. Lor was married to and subsequently divorced from TV director and singer Jay Martin, with whom she had sons, Ron and Dennis. They had met when she was singing on The Garry Moore...
and Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner is an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during this career...
. 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
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
's 1982 album Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch
Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch
Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch is an album by Frank Zappa, released in May 1982 and digitally remastered in 1991. It features five tracks composed by Zappa, and one song, "Valley Girl", co-written with Moon Unit Zappa, his daughter, who provided the spoken monologue mocking some of...
. Price's other captions for that drawing include "Mother pyramid feeding her baby."
Mad Libs
Mad Libs
Mad Libs 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...
, 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:
- The duo found a printer and self-published 14,000 copies. Soon thereafter, Ballantine Books founder (and friend) Ian Ballantine agreed to distribute the book on a short-term basis. That first printing did not last long. Stern, then head writer and comedy director for NBC's The Steve Allen Show, suggested to Allen that they use the Mad Libs format to introduce guest stars, with the audience supplying words. Allen agreed, and on the next show he held up Mad Libs as Bob Hope was introduced (audience members described the comedian as “scintillating” and dubbed his theme song, “Thanks for the Communists”). Within days, bookstores sold out of Mad Libs. In the early 1960s, Price and Stern partnered with Larry Sloan, an old high school friend of Stern's, to create their own publishing company. Sloan became CEO of Price Stern Sloan and his partners wrote additional Mad Libs titles, gearing them toward children since much of their fan mail was from kids. With multiple titles landing on bestseller lists and the house's acquisition of other popular properties including Wee Sing, Mr. Men and Little Miss and Serendipity, Price Stern Sloan grew to be what Stern terms “the biggest publisher west of the Mississippi at the time.” In 1993, Stern and Sloan (Price had died three years earlier) sold their company to the Putnam Berkley Group.
Price and Harvey Kurtzman
Price had four articles in Harvey KurtzmanHarvey Kurtzman
Harvey Kurtzman was an American cartoonist and the editor of several comic books and magazines. Kurtzman often signed his name H. Kurtz, followed by a stick figure Harvey Kurtzman (October 3, 1924, Brooklyn, New York – February 21, 1993) was an American cartoonist and the editor of several comic...
's Mad
Mad (magazine)
Mad is an American humor magazine founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952. Launched as a comic book before it became a magazine, it was widely imitated and influential, impacting not only satirical media but the entire cultural landscape of the 20th century.The last...
in 1955-56 and later contributed to Kurtzman's 1960s magazine Help!
Help! (magazine)
Help! was an American magazine published by James Warren. It wasHarvey Kurtzman's longest-running magazine project after leaving Mad and EC Publications, and during its five years of operation it was always chronically underfunded, yet innovative...
. In the introduction to Mads first paperback collection, The Mad Reader (Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a...
, 1954), he described Kurtzman's appearance:
- He is 5 feet 6 inches tall and has a physique that is just barely noticeable and a long expression. In fact, Harvey looks like a beagle who is too polite to mention that someone is standing on his tail. This Beagleishness has certain compensations - he is never ordered off the grass in Central Park and Pretty Girls frequently stop on the street to scratch him behind the ears.
Books
Science fiction fandom
Science fiction fandom or SF fandom is a community or "fandom" of people actively interested in science fiction and fantasy and in contact with one another based upon that interest...
, appearing occasionally in science fiction fanzines, as noted in Fancyclopedia II (1959):
- In Price's In One Head and Out the Other, the bible of Avoidism, his character Clayton Slope "had a clever trick of saying any conceivable sentence so that it sounded like "I had one grunch but the eggplant over there." Fans find the expression useful, too... Avoidism: Not originally fannish at all, but a philosophy devised in a rather stomach-turning book, In One Head and Out the Other, this doctrine became confused/associated with the Gandhi-following folk of Eric Frank RussellEric Frank RussellEric Frank Russell was a British author best known for his science fiction novels and short stories. Much of his work was first published in the United States, in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction and other pulp magazines. Russell also wrote horror fiction for Weird Tales, and...
's "And Then There Were None". It inspired an APAAmateur press associationAn amateur press association is a group of people who produce individual pages or magazines that are sent to a Central Mailer for collation and distribution to all members of the group.-Organisation:...
, MYOBMind your own business"Mind your own business" is a common English saying which asks for a respect of other people's privacy. It can mean that a person should stop meddling in what does not concern that person, attend personal affairs of others instead of your own, etc.-Origin:...
and an Avoidist Movement which avoided amounting to anything. Tenets are those implied by the root word. Lee HoffmanLee HoffmanLee Hoffman, born Shirley Bell Hoffman, was an American science fiction fan, an editor of early folk music fanzines, and an author of science fiction, Western and romance novels.In 1950-53, she edited and published the highly-regarded science fiction fanzine, Quandry...
explains that three types of avoidism are distinguished: (1) pure, (2) applied, and 3) active, or Activist. In pure avoiding, one avoids everything except eating, breathing and metabolizing. In applied avoiding, one avoids as many things as possible. (Bus drivers are good at this sort of thing, like avoiding people waiting at bus stops.) Active avoidism isn't true avoidism and is practiced to Publicize the Cause, or as an exercise in Avoiding. Under active avoidism there is the subgroup Counteravoiding; to counteravoid vegetarianism, for instance, one eats meat. Leeh concluded: "A last word on Avoidism: I had one grunch but the eggplant over there."
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
Lyle Stuart
Lyle Stuart was an American author and independent publisher of controversial books....
claimed was one of his worst-selling books. It was described by Robert Michael Pyle
Robert Michael Pyle
Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist and author who has published twelve books and hundreds of papers, essays, stories and poems. He has a Ph.D. from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He founded the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in 1974...
in Orion Afield (Autumn 1998):
- By chance, when I was buying Daniel QuinnDaniel QuinnDaniel Quinn is an American writer described as an environmentalist. He is best known for his book Ishmael , which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991....
’s book (Ishmael) at Powell’s Books in Portland, I first spotted Roger Price’s J.G., The Upright Ape. This 1960 novel also employs the device of the gorilla as the protagonist. J.G. is a member of a fictional high-elevation subspecies called the silver gorillas. His search for his abducted mate, Lotus, in America becomes a vehicle for sharp, witty satire of contemporary culture. "For the first time in his life, J.G. was unhappy. It required great concentration on his part, because it isn’t easy to be unhappy when you have such a tiny brain." Neither author can challenge Schaller’s and Fossey’s gorilla scholarship, but their fictions point to a conclusion that the researchers might recognize: gorillas—gentle, cooperative, environmentally benign—are in some ways better than humans.
Roger Price Gallery
During the 1960s, Price opened the first New York art gallery devoted solely to cartoons, and in 1965-66 he edited his short-lived humor publication, Grump, which featured such contributors as Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
, Christopher Cerf
Christopher Cerf
Christopher Cerf is a U.S. author, composer-lyricist, voice actor, and record and television producer. He is known for his musical contributions to Sesame Street, for co-creating and co-producing the award-winning PBS literacy education television program Between the Lions, and for his humorous...
, Derek Robinson
Derek Robinson
Derek Robinson is a British author best known for his military aviation novels full of black humour. He has also written several books on some of the more sordid events in the history of Bristol, his home town, as well as guides to rugby...
, Susan Sands, Jean Shepherd
Jean Shepherd
Jean Parker Shepherd was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer and actor who was often referred to by the nickname Shep....
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:
- I had a friend, Roger Price, who devoted much of his life to the study of women. As part of his research, he married four of them. One of them was a Japanese woman who spoke no English. So amicable were the four divorces that Roger never paid a single dollar in alimony. Although Roger, creator of Droodles and author of In One Head and Out the Other, had a reputation as a satirist and a curmudgeon, he was extremely fond of women, and never made a secret of the fact that he found them more interesting than men. And what's more, he would add, they smell better. One day, when Roger was getting up in years, he confessed to me: "When I was young, I kept women around for sex. Now, I have sex with women in order to keep them around."
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.
Listen to
External links
- Penguin Group (USA): Roger Price
- Roger Price at the Internet Broadway DatabaseInternet Broadway DatabaseThe Internet Broadway Database is an online database of Broadway theatre productions and their personnel. It is operated by the Research Department of The Broadway League, a trade association for the North American commercial theatre community....
- Mad Libs official site