How to Include Profanity in Plays

Video Transcript

STEVE CAVERNO: Steve Caverno, on behalf of Expert Village, here to talk to you today about dialogue. Now we're going to talk about profanity. Now, for the purposes of our demonstration so we can keep this all PG-rated, I've replaced some of the curse words with "flipping" and "golddog," so they'll stand in place of your traditional curse words. Let's look at this. "You think things flipping stink now. Imagine flipping years from now when nobody can flipping go outdoors because the flipping ozone layer is gone and flipping everyone has to flipping go nocturnal like golddog flipping vampires." Okay, so let's pretend like those are curse words in there. Let's look at this and see how we can modify this. Okay. "You think things flipping stink now." Okay, well, that's acceptable. You can keep that. "Imagine years from now when nobody can go outdoors because the flipping ozone layer is gone and everyone has to go nocturnal like golddog vampires." Okay. You see, this way--not everyone is Quentin Tarantino. We're not all going to be able to write profanity the way he does and then make it so attractive to an audience, but a lot of times amateur playwriters will litter things with profanity because they think it's cool, because they're using it to add a level of realism. Really, you don't want to add that much; I mean, most people don't really curse that much. If they're going to say a curse word, they'll usually say one or two in a sentence. They won't go off saying like twenty curse words in one paragraph. So it does add a level of realism. Sometimes, people do say curse words, but you don't want to overdo it. Sometimes you just get to saying it, and sometimes it feels good on the page just to add all that gritty profanity, but it might not actually play the way you want it to. And if you really look through your script and look for the moments where profanity is going to add something to the character, you'll find that usually less is more.

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