How to make a comedy about Hitler.

I'm sure you could think of a lot of rules, but surely one of them is: Don't make Hitler sympathetic. Yes, perhaps in comedy, rules are there to be broken, and as soon as you come up with an important rule, someone's going to say, then that's the one we've got to break. You're betting on your own genius then. And most films are... bad:

The advance buzz about “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” which opens [in Germany] Thursday, has been almost uniformly negative...

“Most of the jokes are flat, harmless or stale, and what’s particularly offensive is that Adolf Hitler, of all people, is given quite sympathetic character traits,” wrote Harald Peters in Welt am Sonntag.

Even Helge Schneider, the madcap German comedian and actor who portrays Hitler, has distanced himself from the film, saying in a radio interview here: “It didn’t thrill me. I just don’t find it funny.”

No doubt, some of the bad reaction is a matter of taste. “Mein Führer,” directed by a Jewish filmmaker, depicts Hitler in scenes that could be drawn from a movie by the Farrelly brothers — wetting his bed, playing with a toy battleship in the bath, padding around his office on all fours while barking like a dog and so on.

But the noisy national debate — over what is by all accounts a flawed film that the public has not yet seen — shows that Hitler remains an enduringly uncomfortable topic for many here.

"Uncomfortable"... "for many"...