“We killed the people who did good entertainment,” he said. “We robbed our own culture out of ignorance, and anything which comes after that, of course, bears its stamp.”

Mr. Böhmermann does not take himself quite seriously enough to proclaim a mission. But it is clear that restoring some of what he called “the world-class humor” — overwhelmingly Jewish — of Berlin’s cabarets of the late 1920s and early ’30s is a guiding thought.

To hear him tell it, Mr. Böhmermann was predisposed to his current role. Credit, he said, goes first to his mother, who noticed early “that she had a rather strange son” who liked to mess about. She enrolled him in circus lessons and drama clubs — unusual, he said, in a staid society in which “you get arts lessons only if you are the best violinist.”

When his father, a policeman in Bremen, died of leukemia when Mr. Böhmermann was 17, he had to earn money. So while his peers were out partying, Mr. Böhmermann started writing newspaper reviews of weekend cabaret acts, at 40 pfennigs (a few cents) a line.

That work led to Radio Bremen, the local public broadcaster, where he joined an Internet department mostly seen as a parking place for underperforming journalists. “They had absolutely no idea,” Mr. Böhmermann said, “and so, at 18, I just hung out on computers and thought it was interesting.”

From there he “slid in” to his first radio show when he was 19. “I liked moderating, though I also did an apprenticeship as a journalist and even thought about going to Washington,” he said. “But it did not work out, and anyway humor was more fun.”

Eventually, armed with a rare twin knowledge of computers and comedy, Mr. Böhmermann made it to Cologne and the country’s biggest public service broadcaster, WDR, or Westdeutscher Rundfunk. He worked with one of Germany’s best-loved comics, Harald Schmidt, writing sketches and doing some on-air work. “As it goes in life,” Mr. Böhmermann said, “you eventually land somewhere.”