OK, so you’ve tapped your toes along with Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler.” After all, when American Jews poke fun at Nazis, it comes with the presumption that we earned our right to ridicule them.

Now comes Dani Levy’s gleefully wicked and controversial parody. It is late 1944. The armies of the Third Reich are in retreat; the empire is crumbling. A depressed, whining Adolf Hitler is incapable of delivering an important inspirational speech on New Year’s Day. A worried staff call for his former acting teacher, Adolf Gruenbaum, a Jew, releasing him from a concentration camp to help Hitler reclaim his lost charisma.

Gruenbaum’s sudden access to the Fuehrer is rich turf for staging comic revenge fantasies (Hitler must bark like a dog) and Levy delights in satirizing the craze for Hitler psychobiography (his harsh father and childhood bed-wetting come up as issues).

Levy, a Swiss-born Jew, has deliberately cast and produced the film in Germany and, just as in The Great Dictator, there is more going on here than ridicule. When Gruenbaum and his wife have the chance to do away with the Fuehrer, Levy seems to ask his German public, “What would you do?”