Multiple Choice Form Letter
A form of letter or other writing where the least amount of personalization has been made via circling multiple choices or fill-in-the-blanks. The blanks are often names or dates as these are elements that are impossible to make uniform. For example a letter might start "Dear [ ], we were happy to receive your opinions on [ ]" so that the blanks can be filled in and customized with the correct name and information later.
In Real Life this trope is simply a practical way to save effort, but in fiction it is often played for laughs as a fill-in-the-blanks letter contains faux-sincere language or is hilariously inapplicable to the given situation. This is actually the concept behind the children's game, Mad Libs where a short story is told with blanks left so that a group can yell out random words fill it in creating a humorous nonsense story.
When the trope is verbalized it becomes Mad Libs Dialogue.
Not to be confused with Multiple Choice Past which is something entirely different.
Literature
- The Big Book of Top Gear includes a parody form letter for Daily Mail readers to use every time they want to complain about the show, with checkboxes for things like "I was [disgusted/enraged/sickened/aroused] to see [Jeremy/James/That girl]..." and so on.
- In Discworld, Corporal Carrot doesn't seem to grasp the concept of form letters as he leads the new Night Watch recruits in taking the oath:
- In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Greg uses a form with blanks to write his thank you notes. It's not very personal.
- In Catch-22 to show how little the commanding officers cared about their men, Colonel Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn use a form letter to tell the relatives of soldiers that their [Husband / Father / Brother / Son] has been [Wounded / Killed / Captured].
Live Action TV
- In How I Met Your Mother, Barney has a form letter he leaves to girls who he sleeps with and then walks out on. At one point, he cannot remember the girls name and simply fills in "Resident".
- Also, in one episode Marshall rereads an old Mad Libs book where every word he's filled in is some form of "fart". He still finds it pretty funny.
Tabletop RPG
- Shadowrun sometimes used this with electronic form letters. The computer sending the letter decides which phrase to use depending on the recipient's status.
Web Comics
- In Penny Arcade, Tycho writes a comic using blanks so that he has a comic ready about a convention he has yet to attend. It's played for laughs because it results in Mad Libs Dialogue.
Web Original
- The "Standardized Bonehead Reply Form" to clueless people on the Net uses this format.
- A form letter detailing common objections to suggested methods of fighting spam has widely circulated on Slashdot's comments section and other forums.
Real Life
- Steve Martin's stock fan letter reply.
- Robert A. Heinlein also had a checkbox letter that he used for responses to fan mail.
- Saxton Hale from Team Fortress 2 responds to events in the real world with letters of this form, with one for fans ordering items and one for inventors and invention thieves.
I look forward to [X] WORKING WITH YOU IN THE FUTURE [ ] PUMMELING YOU TO DEATH WITH MY DAMN BARE HANDS. |
- Back in The Seventies when the Generic "brand" first became popular, there was a parody "Generic Greeting Card". It looked like the standard generic style on the outside, reading GREETING CARD, and on the inside there was a list of checkoffs with boxes [Happy Birthday / Happy Anniversary / Congratulations / Hello / etc.]
- There are lots of these in Private Eye, in the form of apologies from papers. For example, in a year when news about youth anorexia and obesity had been circulating, the apology would end with the note, "For God's sake, [stop/keep] eating."