Last Friday I reblogged as a flashback an old post called Dad Libs, a Mad Libs Alternative. This week I’m including one that never made it from the family YouTube channel here to the blog, so I know it will be new to most of you. I’ve decided to include our very first Dad Libs recording as well, to offer up a bit of history on the art of our family’s twist on an old game. I’ll post that one below the newer one for comparison (the old webcam gives it a real historical feel).

Like Mad Libs, the game that inspired us, which was created in the late 1950’s by the team of Leonard Stern and Roger Price, our twist, “Dad Libs” is a language game. It operates on the same principles as the original, but it calls for the whole family to be creators, not just to fill in the blanks of someone published by someone else.  A blind panel of friends or family members are asked to give seemingly random parts of speech to fill in the blanks of a text.

The creative-ish part is that we take turns deciding what the text will be, a poem, a famous speech, an obscure news story, whatever you think will be fun. Then you copy and paste the text, and proceed to choose which words to blank out, words that will be filled in by the rest of your merry band, who have no idea what text you’ve chosen.

Then the really fun part is that you turn on the camera, and make someone read the newly altered text for the first time, and save for posterity the giggles and gaffs. If you don’t have kids, don’t worry, your friends will enjoy this as well. Honestly this has to be better than sitting around the kitchen table playing bridge.

If you’ve never done Mad Libs and are still confused, you might want to google it because the explanation I give in the older of the two videos below is pretty feeble and fumbling.

This newer video was recorded last Summer (You can thank the Monkey for his editing) and in it we are mad-libbing Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” followed by Tom Hanks’ award-winning grave-side monologue from the movie “Forest Gump.”

The second video was actually our first one back in 2010, and my son Jonathan aptly named it “The Gettysburg Massacre.” In the clip’s description (on YouTube) you can find the whole text, which you are free to copy, but trust me, you’ll have even more fun if you do this from scratch. If you have even more time to procrastinate on this Flashback Friday, you can watch the whole playlist here. I hope it inspires you to try something creative like this with your clan.

Enjoy!

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