Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
Wacky Summer Mad Libs
Author: Roger Price, Leonard Stern and deeply bored, anonymous children
Publisher: Scholastic
Date: 1988
Discovered at: Second Chance Thrift, 1229 E. 63rd Street
Representative Quote:
page 13: “If none of these smell activities appeal to you, take up a/an fat hobby such as saving dogs or learning how to cook Chinese dinosaurs.”
To the untrained eye, Wacky Summer Mad Libs offers little more than just Mad Libs slightly wackier and more summery than the norm. Your Crap Archivst, however, encourages you to roll up your sleeves and delve. Only by digging does crap yield its riches.
Here, we have not just a sample of late-'80s grammar-related absurdity. It is a human and revealing narrative of the id, repression and the contemporary American family.
The completed Mad Libs here have been filled in by three different writers. The first we'll call Thick-Penciled Child, who seems at first a sloppy and witless kid:
Then we have the older, more daring Red-Penned Sibling. Red-Penned Sibling's early work is no less uninvolving than Thick-Penciled Child's: lots of "cat"s and "desk"s. Only a "Uranus" indicates the spirit chained within. One day, sick of playing it safe, burning with the wildness of youth, Red-Penned Sibling burst free of the stifling conventions of this family.
Here's the exuberant result:
Yes, this is crass and stupid. And, yes, Red-Penned Sibling misspells “butt,” “penis,” and “vagina.” But let me be perfectly clear. Anyone who finds nothing to savor in the line “Take a fucken basket full of weiners and monkeys to the patients” actually hates freedom.
In fact, I think that's McCain's health care plan.
Notice, though, that the spelling of “butt” has been corrected. In pencil. And that the dirtiest words have all been circled. Clearly, Thick-Penciled Child was both alarmed and enthralled by such irreverence. Perhaps so alarmed that it was Thick-Penciled Child who brought Red-Penned Sibling's work to the attention of the third character in this drama: Parent With a Pencil.
Parent With a Pencil restores Wacky Summer Mad Libs to bland decorum on the very next page:
And it goes on like that, so dull and joyless that it's the Mad Lib equivalent of shopping with your mother for itchy new church clothes.
Highlight: Sadly, our story does not end there.
Later, alone, Thick-Penciled Child attempts a Mad Lib. Terrified of both Parent With a Pencil and the feelings stirred by Red-Inked Sibling's bawdy imagination, the spiritless kid chooses politeness over humor and caution over art. The result is certainly the most heartbreaking Lib in the canon: one filled in with almost nothing but the “right” answers.
Still, there's hope. There, snuck in at the very end, far past what Parent With a Pencil is likely to read ... see that "sexy"?
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I would just like to second the thoughts of basket full of weiners and monkeys, and observe that a regular, non-Scherstuhly average slob would have passed over a book of filled-in Mad-Libs.
Please make Mad Lib reviews a regular part of your publication's coverage of the kansas City arts scene.
Wow, Turbo Josh. You make me wish that Mad Libs had caught on enough to have some bad 80s movies about them. I'd love to see D-Lib and Mad-D using their mad parts-of-speech skills to save the senior center.
Does Thick-Penciled Child, in his penultimate sentence, claim to be able to "breack" [sic] hard?
Look kid, just 'cause you taped Electric Boogaloo off TBS and watched the final scene frame-by-frame, over and over, until even the tracking knob on your big ass VCR had no effect on the shitty picture doesn�t mean you can bring it.
I�ll tell you what, Beeitch � save a rec center from getting leveled using only the power of pop-locks. THAT�S breackin� HARD, you cocky fuck.
And by the way, a word to the wise - stop recording in SLP mode. Yeah, it saves tape, but at the expense of picture quality. Your frame-by-frame analysis of my moves is horseshit if you�re missing 2/3 of the frames. Use SP, Dumbass.
Why does everyone hafta keep making fun of the thickness of my pencil? Mommy tells me when I grow up that it will be highly sought after. Daddy says, �Yeah, by boys!�.
Daddy is mad.
Also, Daddy says that the Chinese cook dogs and save dinosaurs. Daddy also says that the Demecrats all want to fill butt holes and give money to stupid people.
Anyway, thanks Crap Arch, it feels sexy to be published.
XOXOXOXOX
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