But Mr. Fadl, sipping tea at a crowded street cafe, laughed off their jabs. “If I allowed my spirits to be controlled by the impact of my writing, I would have been in a ward for the insane by now,” he chuckled.

“I’m only expressing my opinion,” he said, and readers “can either read it or throw it away.”

“There is no need to take it personally,” he added.

MR. FADL, 39, worries little about appearances: He wore the same brown shirt, jacket and pants to two interviews in the same week. He lives in a congested middle-class neighborhood in downtown Cairo. He spends his spare time telling profane jokes with friends at cafes where thick Turkish coffee sells for about 15 cents a cup.

Born to a Yemeni father and an Egyptian mother, Mr. Fadl grew up in relative poverty in the coastal city of Alexandria, sharing a house with 10 siblings. After moving to Cairo to study journalism in the early 1990s, he wrote freelance articles to cover his expenses. In 1995, the journalist Ibrahim Eissa, then an outspoken critic of the Mubarak government, started an independent newspaper and hired Mr. Fadl, eventually giving him his own column. Mr. Fadl called it “Alameen,” meaning “two pens” in formal Arabic and “two slaps on the face” in the colloquial Egyptian dialect.

His frankness stunned Egyptian readers. He referred to government ministers as “donkeys” and wrote that the government should be proud of its care for the mentally ill: “Egypt is the only country that allows the mentally challenged to reach decision-making circles.”

Mr. Fadl’s films feature underprivileged protagonists and pointed messages. His first, “A Thief in Second Grade,” in 2001, was a comedy that told the story of a burglar who cares for his partner’s daughter and falls in love with her teacher. Another, “Haha and Tofaha,” is a ribald farce about a brother and sister who are trying to get each other to move out of their apartment.

“Journalists always ask me about these films thinking they will see tears of regret in my eyes,” Mr. Fadl said, noting that the story lines were borrowed from the lives of his friends and family. “These are films that represent my original class. This is how they laugh and have fun — offensively, obscenely.”