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?

Today, write an over-the-top ad, article or essay enthusing about a new fad diet. Make up the diet to go with it, and it can be as strange or bizarre as you like. Try to sound as ‘real’ as possible while piling up stranger and stranger suggestions and/or claims. What unexpected conditions will this diet cure? What odious personal habits will disappear when you follow the diet’s dictates? What foods must you eat or avoid and why? How will this affect your body and mind? The exercise is to be as convincing as possible about as strange and unlikely a practice as possible. This will certainly exercise your ability to be believable on paper!