Comedian Munawar Faruqui once again finds himself in the middle of controversy, after a clip in which he makes an allegedly derogatory remark about Konkani people went viral. In the video—which was taken during the crowd work section of Faruqui’s performance in Navi Mumbai’s Taloja—he says “Konkani log chu**** banate hai.” He has since faced significant backlash on the internet and issued a public apology for the same.

“As a standup comedian, mera kaam hai logon ko hasane ka, aur main nahi chahta koi hurt ho,” said Faruqui in the clip shared on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Main tahe dil se aap logon se maafi mangna chahunga. Sorry aapko jisko bhi hurt hua hai. Maine jinpe joke kiya tha unhone bhi bahut enjoy kiya tha. Woh show pe bhi sab log the—Marathi log the, Muslim log the, Hindu log the. [As a standup comedian, my job is to make people laugh, and I don’t want to hurt anyone. I wholeheartedly apologise to anyone who was hurt. The people I made the joke on enjoyed it a lot. Everyone was there at that show—Marathi people, Muslim people, Hindu people.]”

The clip was met with outrage online, including from a sitting BJP MLA. Faruqui has frequently been the target of online hate and outrage, ever since he was beaten up by right-wing activists and then arrested by the police during a show in Indore in 2021. The police complaint against him alleged that he had made jokes denigrating Hindu gods, though eyewitnesses told DeadAnt at the time that Faruqui made no jokes about religion during his set, which was interrupted right at the beginning by an activist leader who was angry about an earlier video he had put online and then taken down.