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Felix "Pewdiepie" Kjellberg is among YouTube's most popular creators. Pewdiepie/YouTube

YouTuber and gamer Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg is once again at the center of internet controversy.

In his first video following his month-long hiatus, Kjellberg made racially charged jokes about the coronavirus outbreaks threatening lives in China, South Korea, Italy, and Iran.

In a new upload, Kjellberg addressed the negative response to his jokes.

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It didn't take very long for YouTube creator and gamer Felix "Pewdiepie" Kjellberg to offend the internet, having returned from a month-long break only last week. After making racially charged coronavirus jokes during a recent video, Kjellberg is once again at the center of controversy.

In his first video following the hiatus, Kjellberg reviewed the memes his fans have been sharing to Reddit in his absence and recapped what he's been up to during his time off. The bulk of Pewd's time off was spent at his second home in Japan, where he relaxed and explored Tokyo with his wife, Marzia.

"Since I was in Japan during the time of the thingy, I bought about three boxes of these," he explained near the beginning of the video, while holding up a box of 3M antiviral masks. "I was, like, it's going to happen. I'm going to die."

Slipping three masks over his head at once, Kjellberg proceeded to joke about his preparedness for the outbreak. With a tone of mock seriousness, he threw in a couple nonsensical mock-Chinese phrases.

Later in the video, Kjellberg playfully slipped a fourth mask over his eyes and wondered aloud what would happen to his community subreddit, r/PewdiepieSubmissions, if he were no longer there to preside over it.

"What if I snuffed it randomly? What if coronachan got me, you know?" Kjellberg posed in the video. "What's gonna happen to the subreddit then?"

The use of "chan" — a term of endearment in Japanese — in this context struck many as insensitive, given the rising death toll and economic devastation that coronavirus has caused in China, South Korea, Italy, and Iran.

Donning yet another surgical mask, Kjellberg asks whether he looks "cool" and offers up another phrase in garbled mock-Chinese.

"You can joke about stuff, right?" he quips before finally removing the masks from his head. "Yeah, I remember you can joke about stuff. We're cool."

On social media, some of Pewdiepie's fansdefended his comments, while others questioned whether they should continue to support him. For years, critics of Pewds have been campaigning for YouTube to bar him from the platform to no avail.

Typically, this kind of backlash from viewers would elicit a teary-eyed apology video from a popular creator. But in a follow-up video uploaded to his channel on Saturday, Pewdiepie opted to further provoke his haters with coronavirus jokes and memes.

"Now, I understand this is a bit controversial," Kjellberg stated in the clip, before layering on multiple antiviral masks. "You can't really joke about stuff. Disclaimer: Just because I laugh at something doesn't mean I think it's funny. If anything, it's the opposite. I'm only reviewing this for the sake of historical context."

In the video, Kjellberg went on to claim that enjoying coronavirus memes is not racist because Chinese citizens in cities such as Wuhan are also making memes to cope with the boredom of life under lockdown.

So far, however, Kjellberg's excuses have not been well received.

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