Roger Price (humorist)
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 B. Stern on the Mad Libs series.
He graduated from Greenbrier Military School in 1934, then attended the University of Michigan (1934–1936) and the American Academy of Art in Chicago (1936–1938).
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."
In 1954, Price hosted a Droodles television game show with panelists Marc Connelly, Denise Lor and Carl Reiner.
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.
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.
[2]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).
"[3] A Publishers Weekly article described the rise of Mad Libs after the initial 1958 publication: The duo found a printer and self-published 14,000 copies.
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").
[citation needed] In 1965–1967 he published and edited the short-lived humor publication, Grump, which featured such contributors as Isaac Asimov, Christopher Cerf, Derek Robinson, Susan Sands, Jean Shepherd, and cartoonists Don Silverstein and David C. K. McClelland.
He was the co-creator with Stanley Ralph Ross of the short-lived 1977 NBC situation comedy The Kallikaks, and he also wrote for the show.
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 Russell's "And Then There Were None.
In a key chapter, Price advised mothers to encourage their offspring to adopt Avoidist habits and responses to the tribulations of real life is to have them read, as a nightly bedtime story, his adaptation of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (which he first wanted to use in its original form until the composer demanded too many rubles' royalty), namely Milton and the Rhinoceros, in which the latter triumphs by overcoming and eating the former, whose final blunder was to mistake the FIERCE RHINOCEROS!!
His search for his abducted mate, Lotus, in America becomes a vehicle for sharp, witty satire of contemporary culture.
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.
