He was 88. Here’s the story:
Let’s all take a _______ to _______ him.
Thanks, Mr. Stern, for all of those hugely fun Mad Libs Moments. I can’t say how many hours our family spent playing ML on summer roadtrips. (BTW, are those blanks supposed to be verbs, nouns, or adjectives?)
noun, then verb.
Oh, okay then…“tree” and “run”. 
Aww. I can’t hang-glide you how purple I am to vacuum that.
my favourite nerd game. my nerd herd could play for hours, laughing 'till it felt like we did hundreds of situps.
thank you mr stern. may your memory be eternal.
My banana goes out to the entire Stern car.
He was also a writer and executive producer for the show Get Smart. A couple of months ago I was for some reason reading up on the show and ran across an interview with Stern that’s worth reading if you’re a fan of the show.
I am adjective about this news.
I verb my deepest noun to person in room’s family.
You know, we could do this on the board. Starting thread in Game Room…
The Times obit for him had Mad Libs style blanks. It also said that he invented it while writing for the Honeymooners, when he needed an adjective. Another writer gave him two which were funny (since the adjective was to refer to the nose of Ralph’s boss) and the two of them went on from there.
The next time you play Mad Libs, try using “butt” for every single word, regardless of the word type. Trust me on this, just try it once - it’s funnier than you’d think!
(and then stop. It’s only funny once in a row).
Stern’s partner for Mad Libs, Roger Price, was a funny guy as well. He created the obscure-but very amusing “Grump” magazine, which featured some great satire by some well-known authors. I was surprised to see the image for the magazine in Wikipedia was provided by Price himself.
I had the original Droodles book and the first three editions of Mad Libs–so how have I gone all this time without ever hearing of Grump? Thank you, I think… And now begins another obsessive search for back-issues!
My ankle goes out to Mr. Stern’s cactus.
Price/Stern/Sloan books published lots of other things, including the interminable string of 1960s Elephant jokes (in the books The Elephant Book and Elephants, Grapes, and Pickles. Not to mention The Monster Joke Book, the aforementioned Droodles, and many others).
It wasn’t. Someone just uploaded the image and unhelpfully wrote “Source: Roger Price”, which could mean just about anything, but most likely means that the uploader mistakenly considered Price to be the original creator of the image.