Burma’s best-known comedian, Zargana, has again been banned from giving public performances or promoting his latest film.

The ban, issued by the Motion Picture and Video Censor Board, follows an interview Zargana did with the BBC during the recent water festival in which he criticized the military regime’s arch-conservative rules on culture.

The ban also blocks all public screening of the actor-director’s new film “We Can’t Stand Any More,” a satire on Rangoon’s social life.

Zargana, 45, a dentist-turned-comedian, told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday that the censor board had issued the new ban last Sunday.

Zargana came to prominence in the 1980s for poking fun at the then socialist regime.  “This is not the first time,” he told The Irrawaddy with a laugh. “The authorities always scrutinize my work and if they think it makes them bad they ban me.”

The comedian has been jailed twice for his social and political activism, first as a political dissident in 1988, then again in 1990 while helping his mother in her campaign for the May general elections that year.

He was freed in 1994 on condition that he no longer practiced as a comedian.
But during the government-sponsored “Visit Myanmar Year 1996”, he wore dirty clothes and stood holding traditional Burmese Hpa, or baskets in front of a propaganda billboard.  Then he raised a banner which said “Burmese Hpa have to be made famous all over the world.” Hpa in Burmese means prostitute.

The comedian-whose name means tweezers-won the Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Award in 1991 after being nominated by the Fund for Free Expression, a committee of Human Rights Watch.