I was over at Two-Fisted Freelancing Tales and stumbled across an awesome discussion of the Coen brothers’ movies. I got distracted, however, by the following:

[T]he scene starts in a suburban living room containing a man in an iron lung and ends with Walter destroying a sports car with a golf club while screaming, “This is what happens when you f* a stranger in the a*!!!!” (Or as the censored version on Comedy Central would have it, “This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps!!!”)

Normally the nonsequitors used in place of profanities when the censors get hold of a movie just make me roll my eyes, but this one is hilarious in its own right, just because it’s so silly. So today, pick a book or movie that has some profanities in it (if you try to avoid particularly profane reading material, you can always pick one whose profanities are very mild) and find creative and entertaining ways to ‘censor’ them. Do this to at least three separate profanities (if you can’t find a page with multiple profanities on it, pick non-contiguous paragraphs). Try to free-write possible replacements in list form, then go back afterward and pick the most interesting or entertaining results.

Humour - like romance, like drama, like excitement - needs boundaries. It needs rules, lines, differences, be they social (as in Fawlty Towers), cultural (Borat), gender-based (Tootsie) or moral. As in sex.

This, arguably, is a primary purpose of organised religion. In giving us rules to break it lets us sustain into adulthood a child’s delight in naughtiness. Childish, sure, and deeply, almost definitively human, the urge to transgress is also a constant, renewable source of creative energy.

And the more forbidden the sex - the more illicit, immoral or commercial - the greater the potential excitement, creativity and fun.

The above entertaining quote comes from this opinion piece on legalization of the sex industry in The Sydney Morning Herald by Elizabeth Farrelly. In this case, however, I’m more interested in it for its statements regarding creativity, energy, and humor. Today, write about the subject of boundaries, mores, morals, and their relationship to creativity. How do you think a culture’s mores relate to the creative output of that culture’s people?