Roger Price (comedy)

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."

...
Wikipedia