Maung Thura – better known by his stage name of Zarganar – was taken into custody Wednesday night by police after they searched his house, the family said. He had just returned from the cyclone-shattered Irrawaddy delta where he had been donating relief items to survivors.

Zarganar, who has been imprisoned several times, is known to suffer from hypertension and other ailments.

In an interview earlier this week, Zarganar said he and more than 400 entertainers in Myanmar had volunteered to aid victims of Cyclone Nargis, making numerous trips to the delta to help some of the more than 2 million victims of the May 2-3 storm.

Zarganar, 46, was last arrested and held for three weeks for providing food and other necessities to Buddhist monks who spearheaded anti-government protests in Yangon last September.

His comedy routines are banned for their jokes about the junta that rules Myanmar, also known as Burma.

“Burmese people love to laugh. But if I can’t speak, jokes will still spread. The people will make them up themselves,” he told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview.

Myanmar’s military, which has held power since 1962, could not immediately be reached for comment. The ruling junta brooks no dissent and has frequently arrested artists and entertainers regarded as opposing their regime, even those making seemingly innocuous wisecracks.

Two of the Mustache Brothers, a trio of comedians, were sentenced to five years of hard labor in 1996 after making fun of the country’s ruling generals. A campaign by the London-based rights group Amnesty International later helped secure their release.

Zarganar, whose name means “tweezers,” is also a successful producer, director, writer and actor. He also works as a dentist to pay bills.

He was first arrested in 1988 for his political activities and again for helping his mother – a member of the opposition National League for Democracy – during her campaign for the May 1990 general elections. The NLD, the party of detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, swept those elections, but the military regime refused to give up power.

In an interview this week with the Thailand-based magazine Irrawaddy, Zarganar said that since May 27 he had been to every township in the delta struck by the cyclone except one.

Some areas, he said, had neither been reached by the government nor international relief agencies. He and his group distributed food, blankets, mosquito nets and other emergency aid.

Zarganar said that his group sometimes had “confrontations with authorities” during the trips.

Earlier, other Myanmar entertainers had complained that authorities want all aid to be distributed through official channels rather than by private individuals and groups.

The U.N. has estimated 2.4 million people are in need of food, shelter or medical care as a result of the storm, which the government said killed 78,000 people and left another 56,000 missing.

Myanmar’s regime has been sharply criticized by the international community for its inept handling of the disaster and for barring foreign aid workers from the delta. The ban was later officially lifted but aid agencies still report holdups and foot-dragging by the regime.