CAIRO — When the Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef came back on the air late last month, everyone wondered whether he would have the courage to mock the army and its leader, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, as he once did the Islamists and former President Mohamed Morsi — and whether he’d get away with it.

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Youssef’s satirical news show, “Al Bernameg” (“The Show”), was off during Egypt’s bloody, turbulent summer. Youssef’s return performance, on Oct. 25, poked fun at the over-the-top jingoism that has followed the army’s ouster of Morsi. It featured a skit in which a baker selling Sisi-themed pastries pressures the presenter into buying more than he wants (“You don’t like Sisi or what?”). In another skit, Egypt, portrayed as a silly housewife, calls in to a TV show to talk about the end of her disastrous marriage to an Islamist and her new crush on a military officer.

That was it for Youssef’s show: It was suspended. On top of that, the public prosecutor announced that he was investigating 30 different complaints filed against the comedian for insulting the army.

This isn’t the first time Youssef’s irreverence has irked the thin-skinned and powerful. After the comedian relentlessly mocked Morsi last year, supporters of the president took him to court for defaming him and insulting religion. (The case was eventually dismissed.) Now Youssef faces censorship and legal troubles once again; freedom of expression is as threatened under the military-backed government as it was under the Muslim Brotherhood.

A cardiac surgeon obsessed with Jon Stewart, Youssef took his chance, in those first heady days in early 2011 after President Hosni Mubarak’s toppling, to create a new kind of comedy show in Egypt. He went after well-known media and political figures, using their ridiculous or inconsistent public utterances against them. He made the kind of jokes that Egyptians routinely exchange in private but that are considered too direct or too disrespectful for television.

When I first met Youssef back then, he was filming his program in a room in his apartment and uploading it to the Internet. Less than three years later, he had become a media phenomenon, with a show on a privately owned satellite channel, CBC, that is a national rendezvous with tens of millions of viewers. CBC claims the show was suspended because it had “violated its agreement” with the channel and had not abided by its editorial policies.

Be that as it may, a video leaked last month showed army officers in a private meeting with General Sisi raising concerns about unflattering portrayals in the media and suggesting that part of the solution would be to obtain the “cooperation” of the businessmen who own private newspapers and satellite channels. Encouraging individuals to file defamation lawsuits has long been a government tactic to quell dissent.

At the end of the Oct. 25 program, Youssef turned serious for a moment. “It’s hard to be funny in the midst of violence and fear and anxiety like this,” he said. “I won’t side with those who attacked me and called me an unbeliever,” he went on, referring to the Islamists. “But at the same time, I don’t agree with hypocrisy turning people into gods and pharaohs and repeating the same mistakes of the last 30, maybe 60, years.”

Those who would silence Youssef are indeed repeating the same old mistakes. No one knows when or if the next episode of “Al Bernameg” will air. But outside the theater in central Cairo where the show was filmed, giant posters feature Youssef’s lopsided smirk and raised eyebrows.