Roger Price (humorist)

This article is about the humorist. For other people with the same name, see Roger Price.

File:Grump cvr.jpg

Donald Silverstein cover for Roger Price's 1965-66 humor publication, Grump

Roger Price (March 6, 1918–October 31, 1990) was an American comedy writer best known for 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 worked with Bob 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?"

In 1953, Price invented the Droodle, which he described as "a borkley-looking sort of drawing that doesn't make any sense until you know the correct title." When Simon and Schuster published Price's Droodles in 1953, the book launched a Droodle craze that led to a 1954 television game show with panelists Marc Connelly, Denise Lor, Carl Reiner and Price. More Droodles were collected in a follow-up book, Classic Droodles (reissued in a 1992 edition).

Price was a contributor to Harvey Kurtzman's magazines, Mad and Help!, and in the introduction to Mad's first collection, The Mad Reader (Ballantine), he described Kurtzman:

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. [1]

Other books by Price included In One Head and Out the Other (Ballantine, 1954) and What Not to Name the Baby. 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. He also wrote J.G. the Upright Ape (Lyle Stuart, 1960), described by Robert Michael Pyle in Orion Afield (Autumn 1998):

By chance, when I was buying [Daniel] Quinn’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. [2]

During the 1960s, Price opened the first New York art gallery devoted only to cartoons, and in 1965-66 he edited his humor publication, Grump. Humor columnist Burt Prelutsky ("The Squeaky Wheel"), who was friends with Price, recalled:

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." [3]

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.

External links

• Short bio of Roger Price at Penguin Group (USA)
• Roger Price at the Internet Broadway Database