The paper focuses on linguistic creativity in its interplay with various types of constraints imposed by the structures of the language system, discourse traditional conventions, situational aspects or individual, self-imposed rules. The paper will present a case study on a specific joke tradition established in Romance languages (e.g. French Quel est le comble du juge? – C’est de manger un avocat. / ‘What is the comble [roughly, the best or worst thing] for a judge? – To eat an avocado. / To destroy a lawyer.’). A comparison of jokes in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese will reveal similarities and differences between the respective realisations, including formal, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The analyses show that this subtype of jokes can be classified as a constantly evolving discourse tradition. Moreover, the restrictions that text producers must observe can also serve as an incentive to develop the creative potential of playful language use. These considerations will be supplemented by looking at other traditions of wordplay and literary traditions, in particular texts by authors of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle / Oulipo group, in which self-imposed constraints (French contraintes) play a central role. Further examples of onomastic wordplay will show how existing traditions are developed further and, in some cases, given new functions in other communicative contexts.