Harith Iskander vs the convicted criminal Rosmah Mansor

Malaysian comedian Harith Iskander is being sued by the wife of his country’s former Prime Minister for joking she was scary.

Rosmah Mansor – who in 2022 was sentenced to ten years in jail and fined £225 million for corruption – is seeking an unconditional apology and unspecified damages over the joke.

Her lawsuit alleges that he ‘displayed images of scary mythological creatures from Malaysian folklore…. before subsequently displaying the plaintiff’s image to the audience as part of the joke’s narrative’.

He also apparently joked about drivers looking in their rear-view mirror on a dark road and seeing a terrifying figure –  at which point her Rosmah’s figure was shown on screen.

She says this was a deliberate attempt to portray her as a frightening figure, damage her reputation, and subject her to public ridicule and body shaming, local media report.

The case centres around a recording of Harith’s Outspoken Comedy Tour, filmed by an audience member and posted to TikTok.  

The comedian denies that his performance was malicious or defamatory, and should be considered as one ‘split-second’ gag in the context of a 90-minute comedy show.

His defence statement added that the recording and uploading of the clip was unauthorised.

Rosmah was implicated in the 1MDB scandal – one of the world’s biggest embezzlement cases – when more than £3.5billion went missing from an embezzlement fund. 

Documents showed her husband Najib Razak funnelled more than £500million into his personal accounts to fund a supremely lavish lifestyle for himself and Rosmah with police seeing 423 luxury watches, 567 luxury handbags and 12,000 pieces of jewellery from their home. Najib is serving a 12-year sentence for his crimes. 

In December 2024, a Malaysian high court acquitted Rosmah of 17 counts of money laundering and tax evasion due to insufficient evidence.

She is currently on bail pending an appeal over her 2022 conviction for corruption, which revolved around a school electricity project.

Last year, Harith was fined the equivalent of £1,750 after making a pun about the word ‘ham’ deemed to have mocked Islam. 

He posted a joke on social media about an iced coffee drink called ham sap kopi. Ham sap is the Cantonese word for lewd as well as containing the name of the haram pork product.  

Harith was named the ‘funniest person in the world’ in an international competition run by America’s Laugh Factory comedy clubs in 2016.  He released a Netflix comedy special, I Told You So, in 2018 and regularly tours across Asia and Australia, having been to university in Perth.

Published: 14 Jul 2026