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Leonard Stern drives a car with MADLIB on the licence plate. Every once in a while someone will honk at him while waiting at a red light. He'll roll down his window, and the other driver will ask if the license plate has anything to do with the word game.

"I'll tell them, 'Yes, I co-created,'" he said in a telephone interview. "And they say, 'Really' and I say, 'Yes,' and then they say, 'No you didn't.' They think the game belongs to the ages, to time immemorial, and they can't conceive of a contemporary, much less the person they're talking to, having created it. So, I just tell people now that Moses had it on his trip to Egypt to keep the kids amused. And then they accept that happily."

Mad Libs may not have entertained the ancient Hebrews, but the game has provided a diversion for generations of wordsmiths, not to mention legions of kids in the back seat on long drives.

This year, the popular game celebrates its 50th anniversary. Since 1958, more than 110 million copies have been sold. Its more than 60 titles include tie-ins with "Indiana Jones," "American Idol" and "Napoleon Dynamite." This year saw the release of an oversize anniversary edition that includes 125 Mad Libs from the past five decades, as well as Mad Libs by the likes of Anne Hathaway, Steve Carell and the Fonz himself, Henry Winkler.

Featuring short stories with key words left out, the game requires a reader to provide an adjective, verb, noun or other part of speech or type of object. The end result can include plenty of sentences like the following:

I was home alone and scared out of my PUMPKINS.

It was a dark and CHEEKY night.

Count Dracula is the most famous of all UNDERWEAR MODELS.

Stern, an Emmy Award-winning writer, said the idea for the game came to him in 1953 while working on a script for "The Honeymooners." He was trying to think of just the right word to describe a character's nose when his friend and fellow writer Roger Price arrived at his apartment.

"He saw me in an agitated state and asked what's wrong," the 85-year-old Stern said. "I said, 'I'm looking for an adjective.' And before I could tell him why I needed the adjective, he said, 'Clumsy and naked.' I started to laugh because the image of a clumsy nose suggested some genetic disorder and naked nose, the alliteration sounded like a detective novel."

But he knew he was on to something, set aside the script and, with Price, got to work creating a game. They took it to a party that night, thinking it would be a good way to meet women. But another five years would pass before they published it.

"We went from one publisher to another, who in turn sent us from one game manufacturer to another," Stern said. "Nobody was interested in it, and finally we just decided to publish it on our own. What could we lose? Of course, we could lose money, but we were totally unsophisticated and unknowing.

"And when the printer called and asked where to send the copies, we were shocked. We thought he would store the copies. He said, 'I'm not a warehouse, I'm a printer.' So, 14,000 copies of Mad Libs ended up in Roger's dining room."

A friend agreed to distribute those copies as a favor, and following an appearance on "The Steve Allen Show," in which Stern and Price used some Mad Libs to introduce guest Bob Hope, the game sold out in about two weeks. They eventually partnered with another writer-friend Larry Sloan to form the publishing company Price Stern Sloan.

Stern, a friendly man with a gravelly voice who spent some time in Greensboro training for the Army Air Force during World War II, still writes some Mad Libs himself. He typically starts by writing notes on an idea, such as how to avoid paying for extra luggage on an airline.

"My thought would be you wear all your clothes that you're going to need for the trip and pray that the air conditioning works so you don't have to do an impromptu strip tease," he said, explaining his concept. "So, now I work on what you put on first, second, third and how you're able to walk and not waddle. I put in every thought possible with that scene, work it into a Mad Lib and eliminate the sentences that didn't work. I'll be searching for humourous weddings of words so that when I leave out an adjective, no matter what adjective you put in, the next word is going to make it funny."

Putting together a book of about 20 Mad Libs usually takes several weeks, he said.

"It takes longer than what people think," he said. "There's that precise cadence and rhythm that is almost exclusive to Mad Libs, like a haiku. There's something hidden there that neither Roger or I were aware of until we tried to find other people to write them.

"On the surface, they seem very simple and basic, and many people thought that all you did was take out the adjectives and nouns and verbs. But you have to structure the story.

"It needs to have its own beat."

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com