ALL STAND-UP COMICS complain of tough crowds, but none have it tougher than the funnymen of Burma, also known as Myanmar. Even a bad joke (say, one about runners without legs and leaders without brains) can land a comic in jail. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one” has a whole new meaning on the Rangoon circuit (as does the term “kill,” we might add.)

On Monday, Burma’s leaders rearrested Burma’s most famous comic Maung Thura, who goes by the stage name, Zarganar. It’s the second arrest two months for the smack-talking comedian/gadfly. According Irrawaddy magazine, he’s been taken in for questioning and is being detained indefinitely.

As crazy as it for us to imagine Stephen Colbert tossed in jail for his political comedy, Zarganar is intimately familiar with a military dog cell. He’s been arrested numerous times. In 1990, he earned himself five years of hard labor for impersonating General Saw Maung, who was then head of the brutal military junta that runs Burma. Banned from reading and writing, Zarganar scratched poems on the floor of his cell with shards of pottery and memorized them.

Comedy has become an act of defiance but also a lifeline for Zarganar, who passes along jokes over the phone to exiles who run websites in the U.S. Before Burma’s leaders shut down Internet (and the day before his September 25 arrest for giving food and water to protesting monks), he was able to dash off this joke in an email to a friend:

The American president, the Chinese president and Burma’s leader go to visit God. George Bush asks God, “When will the U.S. become the most respected nation in the world?” God replies, “Not in your lifetime,” driving Bush to tears. Then Hu Jintao asks when will China become the richest nation in the world. Same answer from God and tears from the Chinese president. Finally, Burma’s ruler asks when his country will have enough water and electricity. This time, God bursts into tears and says, “Not in my lifetime!”

Talking about laughing through the tears.

Here’s another Zarganar joke that made the rounds after the quickie wedding of Gen. Than Shwe’s daughter and the “early” arrival of her baby: “In other countries, instant noodles and instant coffee are popular. Only in Burma are there instant babies.”

The funny thing is that before Zarganar became Public Enemy No. 2 (No. 1 would be opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi), he started out as a dental school student, where he probably heard this knee-slapper:

A Burmese man goes to India to get his tooth fixed. The Indian dentist asks the man, “Don’t you have dentists in Myanmar?” The man responds, “Oh, yes, we do, doctor. But in Myanmar, we are not allowed to open our mouths.”

That joke actually came from Zarganar’s colleagues in the banned comedy troupe Mustache Brothers. In a New York Times interview, one troupe member appealed to the world community. “We need their help again,” he said. “Richard Gere’s support is especially important because he is a Buddhist. We need a Rambo.”

Um, yeah—something got lost in the translation there. But if Rambo’s busy, how about a Bulletproof Monk?

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