Leonard B. Stern, an Emmy-winning writer, producer and director for television whose frantic search for an adjective one day led him and a colleague to create Mad Libs, the game that asks players to fill in blanks with designated parts of speech to yield comically ________[adj.] stories, died on Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 88.

His death, of heart failure, was announced by his publicist, Dale Olson.

As a writer, Mr. Stern received two Emmy Awards, in 1957 for “The Phil Silvers Show” (a k a “Sergeant Bilko”) and in 1967 for “Get Smart,” on which he also served as executive producer.

Like Mr. Stern, Mad Libs — bound tablets of stories with blanks in strategic places — has a show-business pedigree. First marketed in 1958, it was born by way of “The Honeymooners” and introduced on “The Steve Allen Show.”

Mankind has been playing with language for as long as there has been language, and Mad Libs is assuredly not the first game of its ilk. In 2007, NPR reported on an Edwardian precursor called “Revelations of My Friends.” A slim volume published in London, it contained a set of stories, each masked with an overleaf. Players wrote designated words (“Place,” “Colour,” “Well-known person”) through cutouts in the overleaf, then lifted it to reveal the completed story.