Tickle My Funny Bone: The Censorship of a Naughty Nun Film

Nunsploitation.Net
May 10, 2006

As far as nunsploitation films go, Bollywood's latest Hinglish sex comedy Tickle My Funny Bone seems tame, even innocent by comparison, but try telling that to the angry protestors who have tried to get the film banned, the posters destroyed and the director arrested!

Originally entitled The Naughty Nun, Tickle My Funny Bone was never meant to be controversial.

"I never intended any community to feel bad," director Yogendra Konkar told the Afternoon Dispatch & Courier, a Bombay newspaper. "The story in my movie is fairly simple. It's about a young Catholic girl, who is a nun but wants to return to normal life when she realises she is falling in love with a man. It is a completely fictional character, not based on any real life story."

India's censors, the Central Board of Film Certification cleared the film for public viewing after heavy censorship that included deleting scenes, removing a song and even changing the name of the picture. The CBFC gave the film an "A" certification ("A" for "restricted to adults")

Naughty: One of the controversial posters for Tickle My Funny Bone. Censors objected to the tagline "Story of a Naughty, Bold & Sexy Nun" and to the use of deleted scenes in posters.

However, the board was not happy when movie posters began circulating with the tagline "Story of a Bold, Sexy and Naughty Nun". The posters advertised scenes that the CBFC had cut from the film.

"The producer and the distributor are trying to sell the movie by using objectionable visuals, which were deleted, in the posters," a CBFC board member told The Times of India. "Community leaders should not be influenced by such individuals"

The CBFC has no jurisdiction over posters or advertisements, only the films themselves. In spite of this, the board threatened to withrdraw the movie's certification unless the producer apologized and publicized in papers that the posters were misleading.

Former Bollywood leading lady and Censor Board Chief Sharmila Tagore told Mid-Day the posters make the board look bad: "Although posters do not fall under the purview of the Censor Board, we are contemplating legal action against the misleading display in them. This is bad and has hurt the sentiments of the Christian community," she said, adding, "Several scenes that were likely to hurt the community have been removed from the film. At least 10 to 12 extensive cuts were made and the double entendre, cheap slapstick, an entire song and bad comedy was cut."

The boards actions didn't go far enough for some. Advocate Gerry Coelho filed a petition with the Bombay High Court on April 29 demanding that the film be banned and all prints, CDs, VCDs, DVDs and print material be seized.

Coelho argued that the film is a deliberate atempt to outrage the Roman Catholic community, an offense under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.

In addition to the petition, the All India Christian Council submitted a memo to Mumbai Police Commissioner A N Roy demanding the arrest of Tickle My Funny Bone director Yogendra Konkar. The Catholic Secular Front filed a complaint with the Vakola Police station against Konkar and CBFC chief Sharmila Tagore.

Despite all the passion surrounding the petition to ban the film, the Bombay High Court allowed Tickle My Funny Bone to hit theaters in May as scheduled by adjourning the hearing till June.

Ironically, it was the CBFC that came to the movie's defense, testifying that the accusations were baseless because all objectionable scenes have already been censored from the film.

Censorship woes don't stop there. Catholics in India are mounting protests and some plan on going on hunger strikes. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India called the movie "blasphemous and totally unacceptable to the Christian community" and demanded it be banned in India.

Furthermore, they stated movies like Tickle My Funny Bone and The Da Vinci Code "belittle what is at the heart of Christian Faith and cherished in Christian Life, they hurt the religious sentiments of the Christian Community."

Sexy: Sizzling Bollywood actress Rinki Ali (shown here in a scene from another movie) takes on the controversial of the Naughty Nun.

Our thoughts:
We at Nunsploitation.Net can't help but be overwhelmed at what a crock the Bishops' Conference is trying to put over on us.

We of all people know that there have been many movies far more mean spirited and blasphemous than Tickle My Funny Bone and guess what? The Church is still around in spite of them.

Instead of going after pointless movies, the Church should spend more time fighting corruption within its ranks and tending to their ministries: sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry and comforting the poor.

The world would be a much better place if the Church and groups like The Catholic Secular Forum devoted their energies to good works rather than suing movie producers and going on hunger strikes.

All this bluster is just silly. They're not harming the film, if anything it's getting far more publicity than it deserves.

Update: This story has a very sad ending attesting to the sorry state of affairs in Bollywood cinema.

It looks like all the protests, angry letters and threat of a fatal hunger strike have won out. The Censor Board has agreed to remove all religious imagery from the film including any scene depicting a church, holy symbol or nun.

As unbelievable as it sounds, "The story of a bold and sexy nun" will no longer have any nuns. I'm not sure what kind of movie will remain. The main point of the movie is that the main character is in love, but she has already taken the first steps to committing herself to the convent. By removing that element, they remove the primary source of conflict from the story.

It's just pathetic to see this kind of censorship going on in this day and age. This is a prime example of the slippery slope one ends up on when a bad idea like censorship is allowed to take root, even when the intention is good.

In India's case, the idea was to maintain public order and avoid religious violence (a contradiction in terms if I ever heard one; what kind of religion condones violence as a means to an end?). Now, it almost seems as though the practice of censorship is encouraging religious violence.

You'd never see Catholics threatening to kill themselves over a stupid movie like this in America or other Western countries. It's because they don't see other religious groups getting what they want every day of the week by complaining the simplest things are "offensive".

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Above: Rinki Ali strikes a sexy pose for Tickle My Funny Bone

Above: One of the controversial posters for Tickle My Funny Bone. The word balloon reads "Hey! You're not Marilyn Monroe!"

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